Override 0
by Splickedylit
Summary: "Override 0," says the Duke lazily. "...stand by for orders." / "Acknowledged," Chuck says, quiet and flat and empty. "Standing by." - ((gen: cyborg!Chuck))
1. I: Registration Inquiry

**Length:** 40,000 words overall

 **Characters/Pairings:** Gen, but if you want to read it as pre-polyburners or Chuck/everybody I'm not gonna tell you you're wrong haha

 **Warnings:** Nonconsensual surgery/body-mods, Kane Co. being completely unethical, mind-control (of a sort), blood/severe injury. But hey, there's a happy ending. TuT

 **Note:** Yet another one of my fics that's illustrated on AO3. Even if you do your reading over here, I strongly encourage you to check it out over there as well-I'm very proud of my illustrations! :D Enjoy.

* * *

Chuck maintains stubbornly for weeks after the fight that if Mike had just _looked_ , he wouldn't have picked up a call from the Duke, and if Mike hadn't picked up a call from the Duke the whole mess wouldn't have ever gotten started, and if it had never gotten started Chuck would never have punched anybody.

But it's a lazy Saturday night, Mike is just on that edge of twitchy energy-high he gets when he's been bored for too long, and when a call comes in he doesn't bother to look and see who it is.

"Mr. Chilton!"

Mike jerks back as the Duke's face blooms into existence in front of him, larger than life on his comm screen. Around the room the other Burners look up sharply, instantly on guard. Mike, whose eye is still puffy from Red's beatings and who has some blame of his own to pass around, narrows his eyes and crosses his arms, glaring up at the screen.

"Duke."

"Time for the Burners to pay me a visit," The Duke says, with barely-concealed distaste. "Drive your little rolling scrap-heap on over to my joint, Chilton."

"We're busy," says Mike shortly. He's been bristling for action for days now, but the last thing any of them want to take the edge off Mike's jumpiness is a run-in with the Duke. That lesson's been learned.

"I don't need _all_ of you running around my mansion," the Duke says dismissively, and points at the screen with the head of his cane. "I got one special somebody in mind. I wanna talk to your friend."

"My…friend?"

"The screaming one." The Duke says, and frowns when Mike just stares at him, apparently mistaking Mike's immediate unhappy tension for incomprehension. "—the one with the legs. Y'know, the one who's _surprisingly_ not awful at racing?"

Chuck, who has been watching this exchange with increasing confusion, blinks and huddles down in his chair a little like the Duke might turn around and look right at him.

"' _The one with the legs_ '?" Dutch mutters.

"You want…to talk to Chuck?"

"Sure," says the Duke. "Blondie. Whatever his name is. Send him. _Alone._ "

"Why should I?"

"Because I have something important to talk to him about," says the Duke, and leans back in his chair. "And if I don't tell him, I don't tell _nobody_. Besides, he likes me. I did him a favor."

The Burners share a long look. Dutch is shaking his head—Chuck is just sitting and staring, mouth hanging open. Texas is nodding, and Julie glances at Chuck for a response and then nods as well, mouth twisting up in a _well what are you gonna do_ kind of grimace.

"…when."

"Mm, I'm a busy man. How about…now."

A muscle twitches in Mike's jaw as he grinds his teeth. "Fine," he says, and there's a hint of a growl in his voice. "We'll _be_ there."

"It's a date."

The Duke flickers out, ending the call. Slowly, everybody in the room turns to look at Chuck.

"Is this cool?" Mike asks, and "—what favor?" Texas says, indignantly, and "Man, what if it's a trap?" Dutch is saying, and "We can't afford to just turn him down," Julie points out.

"Ahhhh," says Chuck very quietly. "Ahah. Uh. Well. You already said I'd—I guess I'll just kind of…" he pushes himself up, takes a deep breath and lets it out, then starts slowly walking toward the garage. "…let's go, Mike."

The drive over is tense. Mike keeps trying to plan out some kind of strategy, an exit plan, an emergency backup—Chuck, who was already nervous enough about the whole mess without Mike sitting there stressing and driving like an even crazier person than normal because he's not paying attention, mostly contributes yelling and incoherent noises.

Mike gets slower as they get closer, like he's reluctant to actually arrive, but in Mutt it's not a long drive and it hardly seems like any time at all before she's pulling up in front of the Duke's mansion, grumbling as Mike puts her in park and Chuck reluctantly unfolds himself from his seat out into the cool evening air. The Duke's Number Two is waiting for them on the steps, casting a long, sharp shadow, all legs and vivid red hair. She looks at them like they're something off the bottom of one of her boots for a second, and then pops a bubble.

"You're late," she says.

Mike doesn't bother to answer that—he beckons Chuck closer instead, grabs him by the arm and pulls him in for a rough, one-armed hug. "Tell me if you need me to come get you," he says firmly as soon as he lets go, and glances up at the Duke's mansion with a tight frown on his face. "As soon as you feel like something's going down, _tell me._ Okay? If you don't call for me to get you in the next half hour I'm gonna assume something's wrong and we're gonna come get you. So. Y'know, just…call me, dude."

"You got it."

"The Duke insists you stay at the entrance," says Number Two flatly. Mike glares at her, then looks back at Chuck and sighs through his nose.

"…yeah, okay," he says. "You can handle this. You're gonna be fine."

"Sure."

The sight of Mutt retreating down the Duke's long, winding drive still makes Chuck want to go sprinting after it. Instead, he turns around and looks up at the mansion towering over him. After the dimness of Motorcity at night and Mutt's dark, close interior, it's almost blinding.

"He's expectin' you," says Number Two, and does a sharp about-face, stalking off toward the mansion. Chuck stares after her for a second, then swallows hard and jogs after her. Up the stairs, through the doors, into the familiar huge, echoing room full of perfectly-polished cars. The paintings of the Duke grinning down from every surface haven't stopped being ridiculous, but when he's by himself they're kind of creepy too, and Number Two holds out a hand sharply to stop him in his tracks and then strides up the stairs and stands at attention next to the huge chair, leaving Chuck alone and feeling very small in the vast space of the room.

The Duke is already there, in his throne with some kind of video playing on his screen—when Number Two clears her throat he clicks his fingers and drops the screen, then grins at the sight of Chuck standing there uncomfortably.

"Ah," he says, and Chuck shudders a little bit at the tone of his voice. "There he is."

"Mike says you asked for me."

The Duke nods, although whether he's agreeing or just enjoying the music in his head is anybody's guess. "I got a _bone_ to pick with you," he says, and somehow manages to go from lounging across his throne to standing up without using his arms. Chuck takes a few hasty steps back as the Duke advances down the steps, tapping his cane on one shoulder. "Listen, kiddo—Chuckles, or whatever your name is—"

"My name's Chuck _,_ " Chuck interjects.

"Mmhm, I hear you," says the Duke, and waves a hand. "—now how about you stop talking. _Anyway._ I went digging on you and your little gang. You'd be amazed how much the big man upstairs just—throws out for people to pick up. Including…" he pulls up a screen; white and blue Kane Co. files flicker across it, and he taps one indolently with the tip of his cane. "…things that used to be marked _classified._ "

Chuck's face flickers up on the screen; younger, rounder, wider-eyed. The rest of the file is mostly incomprehensible, garbled symbols, but some of the words are still legible. Chuck's face pales.

"Look," he says, and swallows hard. "—I dunno what…what you think you found, but—"

"Imagine how surprised I was when you were the one I dug up dirt on! It wasn't hard, if you know where to look it's all there."

"Listen—"

"I'll admit, you're convincing." The Duke clicks his tongue, considering. "…do the rest of your Burner buddies know you're a fake?"

Chuck's mouth drops open. He sputters for a second, then manages, "—I'm— _what?"_

"You're not human _._ " The Duke's hand whips out with startling speed and grabs one of Chuck's thin wrists, yanking him closer as he yelps and tries to pull away. "You're a _machine._ I do love a good machine, but I never tried makin' one that thought it was a real boy _._ "

"No!" Chuck's face is very, very pale. "I—I'm not a— _"_

"Command," says the Duke, almost lazily. "Override, code 0; _don't lie to me._ "

Chuck spasms, a startled, full-body jolt; his free hand snaps up to his head, and the Duke catches that one too.

"They make good fakes up there in Deluxe," he says, and presses a thumb hard at the inside of one wrist. Chuck yelps in pain. "—pain sensors now?! _Ow!_ That's some _smooth_ machinery."

His hand slides up Chuck's arm on the word _smooth_. Chuck shudders.

"Seriously, let go!" He yanks on his arm—the Duke lets one of his wrists go, grinning, but doesn't let him pull the other one away.

"So? Who owns you?"

Chuck twitches all over—the Duke leans forward in anticipation, grinning.

"I don't have an owner!" The words come out suddenly loud and sharp and bitter. "Not down here!"

"Oh, _fine._ Who are you registered to?" The Duke clicks his tongue. "Command! Override 0; registration inquiry."

The fight goes out of Chuck's body. "Registration inquiry acknowledged," he says, sudden and flat, and the Duke grins like a predator sighting prey. "Registered—2—September—2318. Age: 18. Combat designation failed. Designated engineering unit prototype, '[unknown], "Chuck"'."

"And?"

"Registration holder…" Chuck grits his teeth for a second, as if he's fighting the words, and then chokes out, "…Kane, Abraham. Transferred to Kapulsky, Julie, 9/3/2318. Transferred to Chilton, Mikhail, 9/5/2318."

"Chilton _owns you_?!" The Duke whoops with wild laughter—Chuck flushes blotchy red and pulls his hand away, drawing tight in on himself. "That explains so much! And he took you right out from under that loudmouth's nose?! _Cllllassy_!" The last word is a ringing shout—Chuck flinches, hunted and humiliated.

"He doesn't know!"

The Duke freezes in mid-pose. Slowly, one leg still raised at an improbable angle, he swivels his head to stare over the top of his sunglasses.

"…what."

"Mike—doesn't know." Chuck hunches his shoulders, talking fast and quiet and unwilling. "He didn't know he was approving the registration transfer, he doesn't know, he's not my—"

"Doesn't know he… _owns_ you." The Duke raises his eyebrows. "…well, he sure acts like it."

Chuck's hands tighten into shaking fists at his sides. "Mike's not—"

"Doesn't know he can override your free-will simulator if he knows the magic words?"

"He wouldn't—"

"Doesn't know you're not human?"

"I _am_ human!"

"Oh please _._ " The Duke snorts. "Stop fooling around. I have to admit I'm impressed you're tryin' so hard, but if you figure—"

"I'm not a _—_ a _robot!_ "

"Android." The Duke shrugs. "Whatever. Listen up now—"

" _Cyborg,_ " Chuck snaps. The Duke raises his eyebrows, amused. "Okay?! I'm a human, I was _born_ a human, they didn't change that!"

"Oh yeah?" The Duke swivels, intrigued and skeptical, thinking it over, then takes a long-legged stride back towards Chuck, closing the gap. "Do tell. Because it sounds to me like you're—" in a flash he has an arm around Chuck's shoulders, pulling him close and throwing a hand out in front of them both. " _~~deep in deni-i-allll~_ yeah!"

"It was all…implants and surgeries." The words slow as the anger behind them fades, reluctant now, dragged out of him. Chuck closes his mouth, fighting, and then takes a deep breath and finishes, "—I was a prototype but they screwed it up. The mental load was too much, they couldn't calibrate the senses down—the anxiety, the…panic attacks—"

"I'm guessing Kane didn't want his cyborg soldier to sit in a lab all day and scream like a lady whenever he moved faster than running speed," the Duke says, a little viciously, and Chuck winces. " _Well._ What a disappointment _you_ must have been. How much of your brain did they—" his fingers wiggle in the air. "—work their magic on?"

"49.3 percent," Chuck says immediately, and then jerks and shakes his head sharply like he's trying to clear it. "But-"

"Mmhm. And how much of your…" the glasses flash as the Duke glances up and down. "…body?"

Chuck goes scarlet and shuts his mouth sharply. The Duke sighs. "Oh, come on, are we going to do this little song and dance every time, Chuckles? I can call you that I assume? Command—!"

"No!"

The Duke stops in mid-shout, frowning at the interruption. Chuck shrinks back and crosses his arms, huddling in on himself.

"Just—please, just stop, okay?" He sounds miserable. "…87.9. 88 percent. Happy now?"

" _Really_." The Duke's eyebrows rise over his glasses. "What parts?"

"That's—th-that's not—"

"Don't make me override you, baby." The Duke's smile could be better described as a leer. Chuck jerks back with affronted surprise, one round eye briefly visible under his hair. "How much of you is still you?"

"That's…that's none of your…" he starts, shaky but tight with something like anger. "Why do you care?"

"I don't think you're in much of a position to ask, do you?" The Duke takes a step forward, spinning his cane slowly from hand to hand. "Answer. The _question_."

"They took my arms and legs and spine and most of my organs," Chuck says, fast and loud and all in one breath. "—okay?! And one of my eyes, and half of my brain, but I'm _not_ —" his voice cracks. He ducks his head and takes a sharp, deep breath, but his voice is still shaking when he finishes, "… _I'm not a robot._ F—" he catches himself on the curse, chewing his tongue, blotchy, humiliated red over ashy white. "Screw you."

"Aw, don't be like that." The Duke sounds downright cheerful now that his point is proven. "Not like I got any reason to tell anybody."

The unspoken message is clear. _Yet._ Chuck shudders just a little.

"You've already got blackmail on me," he says sullenly. "Why do you even bother?"

"You can _never_ have too much blackmail, baby," says the Duke brightly. "Actually—don't call it blackmail, never liked the sound of that word. Call it an _ongoing arrangement._ "

"I'm not calling it that."

"That was all I wanted to talk to you about, anyway." The Duke continues, obviously not listening. "Wanted to see this for myself. And you did not disappoint."

"Can I go now?"

"Well it's been a while since you checked in with your _registration holder_ ," says the Duke, and grins when that makes Chuck's teeth grit. "The last thing I want is Chilton busting in here with his stupid little stick out, waving that thing around near my ladies. Surprised he lets you out of his sight, to be honest."

" _Bye,_ " says Chuck, very forcefully, and turns to the door. "Asshole."

"He's smart though," the Duke calls after him, as he reaches out for the door. "…he doesn't wanna leave me alone with stuff that belongs to him!"

Chuck jerks to a halt in mid-stride, hands curling into fists at his sides, shoulders tensing in sudden fury. For a minute, it looks like he's going to turn back—then he puts his head down and keeps going, walking fast and angry, slamming the door on the way out.

The air outside is cold and damp, full of late-night Motorcity fog. Chuck takes a couple of steps out onto the courtyard in the front of the Duke's mansion, throwing out a long, dark shadow in front of him, and stops, taking deep breaths.

 _What a_ disappointment _you must've been._

For a second he almost turns around to march back in and feed the Duke his own stupid cane. Then self-preservation catches up with him and he stops, gritting his teeth on the bitter burn of anger at the back of his throat. Because he knows the smart option is just to deal with it, because Mike told him to call instead of doing anything stupid, because he's supposed to be the _smart_ one. He rakes a hand through his hair, groans long and pained through his teeth and then turns away again and paces away across the yard in fast, vicious strides, hissing curses under his breath.

There's nobody around, nobody watching when he stops, takes a couple of deep breaths and then slumps down on the steps of the mansion, folding his arms over his knees and dropping his head into his arms. For a second he considers calling Mike and just getting out _—_ but Mike would notice something was wrong as soon as he heard Chuck's voice. Chuck presses his forehead hard into the bone of one wrist and forces himself to breathe.

He's sitting there for a minute or two, knees pulled up to his chest and shoulders hunched, when the high-speed whirring beat of familiar footsteps break the quiet.

"Oh," says a jerky, mechanical voice. "It's a burner. Cyborg Chuck."

Chuck glances up—Cyborg Dan is staring down at him. Chuck groans and drops his head back down, resting his forehead against his knees.

"… _don't call me that._ "

"You are one of us." Cyborg Dan sounds offended, as far as a robot can. "You did not, tell me."

"I'm not a robot," Chuck repeats, defeated, face still buried in his knees. "I didn't tell Mike, why the—heck—would I tell you _?"_

"…you should stay away from MIKE CHIL-TON," Cyborg Dan says firmly, and pats Chuck's shoulder with a metal pincer. "He is. Bad. News."

"Go away," says Chuck miserably, muffled into his folded arms. "Mike's great and you're not even a cyborg."

"Oh. I see how it is." Cyborg Dan's lit-up face frowns. "Not even a little sympathy. From a fellow robot. You. Suck."

Chuck doesn't bother to answer, just puts his forehead back down on his knees and reaches up to his comm. No point putting it off any more.

"Mike?"

Mike comes online so fast Chuck wouldn't be surprised if he was sitting there waiting for the call. "Yeah? You okay? What happened?"

 _He doesn't wanna leave me alone with stuff that_ belongs to him.

"I'm good." It takes an effort to make the words sound genuine, but it's worth it to hear Mike sigh on the other end of the line, relieved. "Can you come back up and get me now?"

" _Sure_ ," says Cyborg Dan _sotto voce_ in the background, with bitter malice. " _Ignore me_."

"On my way." Far down below, at the foggy base of the mountainous pile of trash the Duke has built his mansion on, there's a distant barking rev of Mutt's engine starting up. "What did he want?"

"Nothing?" God, how to even start to explain.

…Don't. Not yet. Chuck rests his chin on his arms, watching as Mutt's sputtering fuschia and neon blue exhaust flares climb the winding road to the mansion.

"…just letting us know he wasn't dealing with Kane anymore, and…I dunno." ( _Chilton_ owns _you!_ ) "I think he just likes freaking me out."

"So you don't trust Chil-ton." Cyborg Dan says, and Chuck glares at him. "You don't want him to know. That's good. He could melt, your face. He has a record."

"Go _away_."

"Huh?" Mike sounds perplexed—Chuck scoots down the steps away from Cyborg Dan and pulls the call back up. "Go away?"

"It's that creepy robot," Chuck says, and hears Dan make more noises of sarcasm and disgust further down the steps. "Telling me you're bad news. I'm gonna kick that thing down the stairs."

Mutt screeches to a halt in front of him. Mike rolls down the window—Chuck sees his own icon flicker out as Mike hangs up the call, grinning at him.

"Hop in."

"My nemesis," says Cyborg Dan, as Chuck pries himself up off the steps and swings himself through Mutt's passenger door. "Be afraid. You are going—to pay. My plans will be—"

"So how's our favorite nutjob?" Mike says, and hits the gas. In the rearview mirror, Cyborg Dan rapidly shrinks, mechanically waving a fist, probably cursing Mike's name. "Still as much fun as ever? He didn't sniff you or anything, did he?"

Chuck snorts. Just being in Mutt and having Mike there is smoothing over the jagged mental static of anxiety—even with Mike's reckless driving, there's a weird kind of safety to being here, in the dark with his monitors and Mike's hands on the wheel.

"He just talked a lot," he says, and doesn't mention security overrides, the awful, stomach-turning jerk as the computer kicked in and some crucial part of his brain flicked off like a switch. "Y'know. I mean, I think he still has a grudge, and he doesn't wanna talk to you because he knows you're still ticked off."

"Of course I'm still ticked off," says Mike, and when he says it it doesn't sound like a replacement for some other, stronger language. Oh, Mike is _ticked off._ Gosh, he's mad. Chuck snorts again, and when Mike glances over at him, questioning, it just makes him laugh out loud. "What? Dude, what?"

"Nothing!" Chuck's laugh turns into a squawk as Mike, not looking, cuts a turn way too close to the edge of the road—Mike glances back ahead and momentarily bothers to correct course, one-handed. "Mike, jeez!"

Mike doesn't bother to respond to that—Chuck yelling at him is basically white noise by now, they both know it—but he does put his other hand on the wheel.

"So he didn't…I dunno. You're okay?" And then, eyes narrowing angrily, "—is this about the driving thing?"

God, he forgot Mike knew that the Duke knew. There wasn't really any way to avoid the whole thing coming out, not when Mike sat down at the table with a black eye and a split lip, frowning like a thundercloud, and said "—now _why was that maniac driving my car_?"

"No, it wasn't that." Shit, but that's the wrong way to say it, because—

"Not… _that_?" Mike glances over again. "—so it was something?"

"No."

Mike doesn't look convinced. Fuck. (And he's almost pushed the word out of his vocabulary, but sometimes there's no other good word, _fuck_ this whole mess) He's worried, Chuck can tell—not just because they've known each other for so long, or by the tense frown on his face, but by the way the speedometer has crawled down to a practically unheard-of 150 mph and the way Mike's been in the same gear for more than three minutes straight. Chuck's never bothered to mention to Mike that the way he drives is almost as expressive as his face.

"It's nothing," he says again, finally. And he knows that Mike knows, he knows that Mike has been friends with him long enough that he hears _I don't want to talk about it please don't ask me_ in every syllable. Mike blinks, taken aback, and then sighs and turns back to the road.

"…okay," he says, quiet. "…gotcha." And then, a little stronger, "…but if he starts doing something—if he starts trying to make you do stuff, or—I dunno, if he does something you don't like, tell me. Okay? Nobody should have to deal with that guy on their own. He's a loose cannon."

Well, that's probably as good as he's going to get.

"Sure," says Chuck, and lets out a breath as Mike focuses back on the road, speedometer ticking up, shifting up into 22nd for a long, wide spiral of road that loops around an old, ruined museum. Mutt flickers in the few remaining windows as they drive, throwing sparkling reflections off the edges of shattered glass. "...I'll be okay."

It's not the answer Mike's looking for and he knows it, but Mike just nods once and looks ahead of them, watching the road pensively as they fly past the neon lights and bombed-out darkness of Motorcity.

* * *

It's almost a week later, after a cathartic tussle with some distant south-side gang in weird clown makeup, and Mike is settled down but still jumpy, when he gets another message. This time he's on the end of the battered sofa, watching Julie, Texas and Dutch all play _Souls of Darkness: The Darkening of Souls IV_ , with Chuck leaned back against his knees typing, and he's distracted and maybe that's why he opens the message without bothering to check who it's from.

"…what's up?" Chuck says after a while, when Mike fails to react to one of Dutch's really spectacular last-minute saves—when he looks up, Mike is staring at the screen, looking angry and confused and mostly just tired. "…Mikey?"

"It's the Duke again." Mike leans back in his chair with a weary groan. " _Jeez_ , he only made you go see him—what, a couple weeks ago?"

"Maybe he thought of more stuff to say," says Chuck, and fidgets. "…Mike, I don't…"

"You don't have to go back up there alone," Mike reassures him before he can even get the words out. "He _wants_ me with you this time, actually. He says you were, uh…"

For a second, pure terror bottoms out Chuck's stomach. "…said I was what?"

"Well, he…he says, uh. 'He was so busy squeaking every time I moved, I don't think he was listening to me at all'." Even through Mike's apologetic tone, the Duke's casual, amused disdain is crystal-clear. Chuck hunches down in his seat. "Don't worry about it, man. I think you're right, he just likes messing with you. Oh."

"What?"

"…'I just like messing with him,'" Mike reads. "…'he makes it so easy'. Uh…yeah. Man, remind me why we have to work with this guy, again?"

"Because he owns a huge chunk of the city and somehow everybody owes him a favor even though he does nothing but make a mess?" Julie groans and throws down her controller. "—I'm dead again. I think I'm really bad at this."

"You gotta use your health potions," Dutch says encouragingly, not taking his eyes off the screen. "—don't worry, that's why I play healer-paladin, just make sure you don't go charging in this time. Rogues don't play like that."

"That's TEXAS'S JOB!" Texas contributes, smashing buttons so fiercely it kind of looks like he's going to break the controller.

"That's Texas's job," Dutch repeats. "That's what the tank's _for_. Just let it happen."

It would be so nice if Chuck could just drop in, pick up a controller and start buffing. But Mike is already getting up, pulling his jacket on, and Chuck isn't letting him go over to that psycho's mansion all by himself. He'd just worry the whole time Mike was gone anyway. He sighs and pulls himself up, shuffling in Mike's wake toward the garage.

* * *

Chuck is pretty quiet on the drive over to the Duke's mansion, apart from the noises of terror when Mike takes a curve too fast or jumps a building to get to an overpass faster. He seems worried about something. It doesn't sit well with Mike—not after that creepy _and send him alone_ message. Chuck said it was fine, but he looked really freaked out afterward. More than just normal just-talked-to-the-Duke freaked out.

But if he doesn't want to talk about it he doesn't want to talk about it, and Mike's not going to push too hard. Chuck can handle himself. They've covered that.

"I can go in by myself," he tries, when the Duke's mansion comes into view in the distance and Chuck makes a quiet whimpering noise that has nothing to do with his driving. "Seriously, he can just _deal_ with it. I don't have to put up with his crap."

"We do though," Chuck says, with defeated certainty. "He still owns the junkyards. His gang's huge, just…let's just get in there and then get back out again, okay?"

"Sure." There he is again, freaking the heck out but doing what needs to be done anyway. Mike smiles as he looks back at the road, and zig-zags slowly up the Duke's mountain of trash to the blinding lights of his front yard. Number 2 is there again when they get there, waiting the same way she did last time—Mike doesn't even wait for her to open her mouth, just grumbles "—I know, I know, he's waiting for us. Whatever."

"Mike." Chuck swallows hard, then takes a couple of hurried steps to catch up as Mike strides toward the front door, catching him by the shoulder and pulling him around. He looks worried, and Mike is abruptly aware of the fact that his hand is squeezing the familiar cold steel of the skull in his pocket so hard his fingers ache. "—Mikey. Chill. Last time you went in there keyed up, there was a bounty and a lot of people tried to kill us and we all got kidnapped. Remember that part? Hostages, bounty, any of this ringing a bell? Or the race, you started fighting and you _bet your car._ Just—can y'cool down first, maybe?"

"I'm tired of this guy yankin' my chain all the time." Mike glares up at the doors. "I'm tired of him acting like it's funny to freak you out, too, where does he get off?"

"Promise me you're not gonna do anything dumb when we get in there."

"Dude—"

"Promise me?"

Mike sighs. "…sure," he says, defeated. "Promise."

"Okay." Chuck squeezes his shoulders once, then lets him go and steps back. "…okay. Let's…do this."

Mike takes the lead, lets Chuck fall in behind him and sees the slight slump of his shoulders that means he's relieved. That's good. Whatever this freak wants to say, he can say it to Mike. And Chuck—

…isn't following him anymore. Mike turns back; Chuck is standing still, staring ahead and frowning vaguely.

"Chuck?" Chuck blinks at the sound of his name, rubs his eyes and shakes his head sharply. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Chuck shakes his head again, scrubs at his eyes roughly and then keeps walking. "…nngh. Headache."

"Well, get ready for _that_ to get worse." Mike says it half as a joke—Chuck groans. "Come on, bud. We'll get in and out as fast as we can."

"…yeah." Chuck chews on his lip for a second, hesitating. "Mike, listen, I—"

"LOOK who decided to show!"

It's been four or five times now. Mike watches the lightshow impassively, arms crossed, feeling Chuck edge a little closer to his shoulder as the Duke finishes off his entrance with a pretty impressive flip and lands neatly on the platform of his throne, leaning on his cane.

"Took you long enough!"

"I'm gonna give you…five minutes," says Mike, instead of justifying that with a response. "And then we're going home."

"Uh-huh." The Duke sounds unimpressed. "No. You wanna hear what I have to say."

"Yeah?"

"Oh yeah." The Duke flops back into his chair in a mess of gangly limbs. "—y'see, I'm _bored_ , Mr. Chilton. I need some action around this little town of mine, keeps me fresh! You noticed how boring it's been?"

Mike has definitely noticed, but it rankles to admit he shares a sentiment with the Duke of Detroit. He doesn't answer—it doesn't matter. The Duke isn't waiting for a response.

"—so I thought I'd get things moving again, and I figured—why not play some cards I've been holding onto for just such a day as this?!"

"Get to the point, Duke."

"The _point_ is that I was gonna keep this a secret," says the Duke, "—but I think you should know, I've got some action for you to get in on."

"If this is about that stupid TV show thing again—"

"Oh no." The Duke waves a hand, dismissing the point. "No, I've got nothing but information for you, Mike. I have something to show you that I think you'll find _very_ interesting."

Chuck tenses abruptly, eyes darting from Mike to the Duke, hands closing tight on the sleeve of Mike's jacket. Mike half-glances back at him with an absent, reassuring smile, not quite taking his eyes off the Duke.

"Yeah?"

"Oh yes."

"…Mike…" Chuck's voice is tight with barely-controlled panic—Mike turns back, worried, but the Duke has already pointed his cane straight at Chuck's chest, grinning wide and satisfied.

"Command," he says, almost lazily as Chuck shakes his head and starts to back away. "Override 0, stand by for orders."

"What?" Mike was about to pull his staff-he stops instead, confused, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Behind him, Chuck goes perfectly still, frozen in mid-step, and then slowly eases back to a stand-still, waiting. "What the heck are you talking about?"

"Acknowledged," Chuck says, quiet and flat and empty. "Standing by."

"Chuck?" Mike looks back to him—Chuck is standing still, staring ahead, barely breathing. "What's up?"

"He's not listening to you, Mr. Chilton," says the Duke indolently, and snaps his fingers. "Command; registration inquiry."

"What's going—?" Mike starts, but Chuck talks over him, even and clear and emotionless.

"Registration inquiry acknowledged. Registered—2—September—2318. Age: 18. Combat designation failed. Designated engineering unit—"

"Duke," Mike says, and there's more than an edge of threat in his voice over a barely-audible thread of panic. "What did you do?!"

"…to Chilton, Mikhail, 9/5/2318."

Mike bares his teeth and takes a step towards the Duke, whose smile falters, but then Chuck is talking again and Mike turns back, transfixed, as screens shimmer into existence in front of Chuck and his voice goes on and on, blank and distant.

"System alerts retrieved. Increased heart-rate. Increased respirations. Increased cortisol levels. Sensory overstimulation. Analysis…" and his voice is shaky for a second, his eyes flicker away and down and his face is ashy. "…I'm…scared. I didn't want this to happen."

"Inquiry," says the Duke, with the air of a magician pulling a really good trick out of the hat. "—how much of you is still human?"

Chuck's hands twitch.

"…100%," he says.

The Duke sighs and rolls his eyes. "Oh alright, make me get technical _._ Picky _picky_. Inquiry; how much of you is still organic?"

"21.1%"

"Chuck," says Mike, and Chuck hangs his head and doesn't meet his eyes. "Hey—look at me, bro."

"You're going to have to override him if you want him to follow orders," the Duke drawls, and kicks his feet up, leaning back in his throne. "He's very…" his glasses slide down his nose as he inclines his head, giving Chuck a lazy, amused look over the rims of his aviators. "… _stubborn._ "

"Let's go," says Mike fiercely, and grabs Chuck's arm. "Come on, Chuck."

"He can't." The Duke points his cane at Chuck. "He _won't._ "

"I can't," Chuck repeats, numb and quiet.

Mike looks from Chuck to the Duke and back again, and then reaches out, wraps an arm around Chuck and pulls.

Chuck flails and then tries to struggle, but Mike has him off his feet and he doesn't have any leverage to resist as Mike pulls him down the hallway. The guards start to raise their guns—the Duke raises a languid hand. "Let them go."

"Duke," says Number Two flatly.

"I _know what I'm doing!_ " The snap is sudden and loud, echoing around the room—the guards jerk to full attention. Number Two frowns but steps back and silently crosses her arms. "This should be prime entertainment."

* * *

Chuck stays tense and frozen and silent until the moment they leave the Duke's property, and then he slumps like a puppet with its strings cut, takes a huge gasp of air and promptly starts to hyperventilate. Mike glances over at him, eyes wide, weighs the benefits of getting back to the hideout against the scary way Chuck is struggling for air, and then makes a split second decision and jerks the wheel, skidding to a halt in the middle of the deserted road.

"Chuck—"

Chuck hunches in on himself as far as he can with his belt on, pulls his knees up to his forehead and _wheezes_ and it sounds like he's going to die. Mike unbuckles his belt to turn in his seat, reaching out in uncertain comfort—Chuck makes a high, panicked noise at the touch of hands on his shoulders and Mike flinches back again.

" _What the heck did he do_?" he mutters, more to himself than to Chuck, and then reaches out again and hesitantly touches the shaking fingers of one hand. When he pries Chuck's fingers up and gets them loose enough to slip his fingers between them, Chuck clenches their hands tight and squeezes hard enough to hurt. "—ow—okay. Uh…it's okay, dude, it's okay…"

Chuck shakes his head jerkily and makes a garbled sound that might be words— _fake_ and _idiot_ and _human_ and _lying_. The hand that's not holding Mike's comes up and clenches white-knuckled in his hair, tugging hard.

 _How much of you is still human_?

The questions Mike wants to ask burn at the back of his throat, but that's definitely not going to help right now. He bites them back and instead he squeezes Chuck's hand, gets a hand behind him to rub circles on his back. That always used to help, whenever he found him having a panic attack in Deluxe. They were never this bad though. _How much of you is still human?_

… _transfer to Chilton, Mikhail…_

The date he'd said was just a couple days before they came down to Deluxe. Before the anniversary. Julie brought Chuck back from some kind of…internship? Another week-long…seminar…thing? Or was it another one of his surgeries? Chuck always got a lot of those, way more than most of the other kids in training with them. There was always a reason though, some kind of disease or a scar from the last one that needed to be fixed, always something urgent and potentially really, really bad that had to be fixed today, tomorrow, by the end of the week.

Mike had always known, ever since they were kids, that Chuck was always sick and always broken. That it was Mike's job to make sure that despite all of the operations and the anxiety Chuck really _lived_ outside of hospital rooms and lecture halls, and that it was just as much his job to make sure nothing bad happened to him.

He's coming slowly to the realization he didn't do his job.

"… _you're still a burner,"_ he says, because that's what's important right now, and Chuck's shoulders hitch. " _No matter what. You're still one of us. You're still my best friend. You're still a burner._ "

The longer he repeats it, the slower and easier Chuck breathes. Mike gets a hand down and opens up the seatbelt, and Chuck slumps sideways against him. Not clinging, just draped against his side and shivering. The gear-shift digs into Mike's side as he leans over and gets his free arm around Chuck's shoulders, but it's not important. Chuck is still shaking so hard his teeth are faintly chattering.

"Are you okay?" is the second most important question, and Chuck squeezes Mike's hand but doesn't answer for a long time. When he does, his voice is tiny and shaking.

"… _no_."

"What can I do?"

Another long minute.

"… _home._ "

Mike buckles him back up and drives slow, and Chuck lies back against his seat and doesn't say a word.

* * *

When they get home, Mike wraps an arm around Chuck's shoulders and steers him in. Dutch tries to talk to them, looking worried as Chuck winces away from his voice—Mike glances up at him and shakes his head minutely. Dutch bites his lip and then nods and backs away.

Chuck relaxes a little bit when Mike helps him into his room and closes the door. It's dark and quiet and a little bit cooler than the rest of the hideout, just the way Mike knows Chuck likes it when he's overloaded. Mike helps him down into the bed and starts to ease him over on his side; Chuck shakes his head mutely.

"…better?"

Chuck hesitates for a long second, then nods slowly, like the motion is painful. "… _didn't want it to go like that,_ " he says, very softly.

"Hey, it's cool."

Chuck lets out a sort of ragged cough that might be a laugh. "Mike, holy shit."

"What?"

"It's kind of a big deal, okay?" Chuck sniffs and scrubs at his eyes—shit. Shit shit shit. "—it's not—you can't just… _shrug it off_."

"I'm not shrugging it off." Mike reaches out again, slowly, giving him the chance to pull away, and rests a hand on Chuck's back, rubbing slowly in circles. "I'm freaking out a little bit. I don't know what they did to you, y'know? I don't know what happened to you, it's…" The words hurt to say. "…scary."

Chuck's mouth falls open. He seems speechless, but Mike sees his mouth form the word _…scared…_?

"Chuckles," Mike says firmly. "You are my best friend. _Ever._ Okay? I don't know what the Duke did to you, I don't know what those—what—Kane's guys did to you. So yeah, of course I'm scared!"

"Oh," says Chuck weakly. "I…oh." And then, quietly, uncertainly, "…you…wanna know?"

"What?"

Chuck ducks his head sharply—scrubs at his face again. "…would it—make you feel better? I mean, if you knew."

"Is that okay?"

Chuck shrugs, and doesn't look up. "…sure."

"No—Chuck, _seriously_. Is that cool?"

"Yeah." Chuck nods, more confident. His breathing is starting to even out again, still scared but not panicking any more. "If, uh…if I wanted anybody to know, you're probably…yeah. I just…didn't wanna tell you like this. Couldn't find the right time, y'know?"

"Okay." Mike sits down hesitantly, waiting. Chuck doesn't look at him; his hands knot up in his lap.

"I could—tell you, but I figure it'd be easier just to show you. So…" Chuck licks his lips, nervous. "I've got the records. Ever since I got the first implant in my eye I've got, like…the pictures. But they're not always available for my brain, you have to ask for them. Ask the…computer part for them." His voice drops, tight with a bitter combination of anger and shame. "…like the Duke did _._ "

"Okay?" the tension is killing him. Having something wrong and nothing he can do to fix it, it drives him nuts. Mike sits for a second in silence, and then prompts, "…I don't know how to do this, dude. You're gonna have to help me out here."

Chuck takes a long, deep breath. "…right. Uh…okay. Say…'command'."

"Command," says Mike obediently. Chuck's whole body tenses for a second, a sharp jerk and release. "—whoa! Hey, if it…hurts you or something—"

"No." Chuck takes a deep breath. "Nah, it just feels…it's like…somebody grabbing me by the brain. Now say…' command…upgrade and enhancement inquiry'."

"You sure?"

Chuck's mouth thins into a stubborn line. Mike sighs.

"…command," he says. "Upgrade and enhancement inquiry."

Chuck stills, his voice goes flat, his eyes go far away. "Inquiry acknowledged. Retrieving." He holds his hands up; screens flicker up in front of his palms. Lists of dates. Files. "Surgical procedures, 167. Programming procedures, 34. Overall project outcome…11%. Failure."

"Uh…" Mike stares for a second, lost for words. _Surgical procedures,_ 167\. "…in…quiry?"

Chuck blinks, a flicker of movement behind his hair. "Define Inquiry."

"Right, okay. Inquiry…why was the project…a failure?"

Chuck's body winces a little. His voice stays even. "Accessing director's note," he says. On the screen, a face pops up; an old man with a harsh, lined face.

"The subject shows signs of increased durability and increased processing speed," he says, and rakes a hand through his hair. Annoyance breaks through his professional tone. "—but he's no super-soldier. The neurological implants have had some…unintended effects. Parasthesias, synesthesias, panic attacks, increased sensitivity in all his senses—we woke him up after the recent recalibration and he did nothing but scream. They're recalibrating again now, but we can only do so many surgeries in one day, Mr. Kane."

The name sends a jolt through Mike's bones. Chuck doesn't move, staring straight ahead.

"The weapons integrated well, and the new holo-screen technology works as well as he theorized it would, but unless you have any objections I'm only going to authorize a few more attempts before I declare this project a failure."

Somewhere far off in the background, there's a terribly familiar, echoing scream. In the present, Chuck's body shudders all over. In the video, the director frowns over his shoulder.

"…twilight anesthesia is more difficult and erratic with the enhancements as well," he says, almost more to himself. "At least his programming is sound. We send him back to his pod with the directive not to mention the project to anyone but his registration holder, and nobody will be any the wiser."

"They said you needed those surgeries," Mike says, distant to his own ears. There's a roaring noise in his skull. "They said you were sick."

Chuck doesn't answer.

"Uh. Inquiry. How do I make you free?"

Chuck's head bows a little.

"Registration has to be held by an individual distinct from the unit," he says.

"What?"

Chuck doesn't answer. Mike growls under his breath. "—just— _talk_ to me!"

"… _it's easier this way,_ " Chuck says, very quietly. "Mikey, please."

"…command," says Mike, and Chuck bites his lip. "…use words I understand."

Chuck hesitates for a long, long second. Then—

"—I can't own myself."

"Why does somebody need to own you, why can't you just be free?"

Chuck shakes his head. "I can't own myself," he repeats, and there's a note of heavy bitterness to his voice.

"Why did they—do this?"

For a second, Chuck's teeth bare and grit. "Successful combat units need failsafes," he says, and he's retreated behind the blank, deadpan computer voice again. Maybe it's easier for him that way. "A _successful_ combat unit would need to be controlled."

"Why you?"

Silence. Then, on the screen, a picture. A letter. Chuck's hands are gripping the paper in the picture, long and skinny and pale. His voice cuts in over top, reading out loud to himself. The video is low-quality and wobbly, not stabilized, and Chuck's voice is so young. Mike forgot how happy he used to sound—the constant, stressed tremor of his voice isn't there.

 _-for your exemplary work at such a young age in the field of computer and astrological sciences, biomedical engineering and robotics…participate in—_ experimental trials of your junior thesis, authorized and _funded by Kane Co_ oh my god! Oh my god—Mikey!" The camera swings away from the letter as Chuck starts to turn—it's their old pod. Small plain and serviceable, low on its building, all they were allowed on the budget for orphans and misfits Kane grudgingly put aside. Chuck stops. "…oh," he says, and the camera—his eyes—drops to the floor, to the letter hanging in his hand. "…right."

The date in the corner says it's the day after cadet conscription. Mike hadn't realized their home looked so empty without his belongings in it.

Blink

"Day one, first day post-op," says Chuck, high and excited and young, and the picture has changed. Chuck is looking at himself in the mirror, eyes wide and bright through the messy edge of his bangs. The picture is way clearer, steadier. "—there's barely a scar, wow! It—" the video jumps. When it comes back Chuck is staring at himself in the mirror, concentrating intensely—he relaxes. "—okay," he says, "—so…gotta learn to control that now, that's okay. Stop—record—stop—record—"

The video flickers in between the words, and he looks so young and so _excited._ He can't be older than fourteen.

Another blink, and the video changes. Mike hears a voice in the background of the recording and realizes with a jolt that it's _his,_ younger and lighter but definitely his voice. He's counting, tight with effort—pushups, probably. He always got antsy when he got a break, spent his free time back at his pod training instead of resting, pushing himself as far as his body could bear. In the foreground Chuck looks a little thinner, older, more stressed. His hair has grown out a little.

"Day thirty-three," he says, and he slurs a little. Blinks hard. "Day…day thirty-three. The…arms feel—wrong. I'll get used to them. They're heavy."

"Hey Chuckles! They said you could eat tonight, right?"

Chuck glances back and then to the mirror. In the mirror, his eyes look worried and tired. When he talks, there's a familiar tremor to his voice.

"…I'm glad there's a break before the next surgery," he says quietly. "I don't—"

"Chuck, come on!" Mike yells in the background, and the image blurs as Chuck glances away from the mirror.

Blink.

"…just woke up," says Chuck, and pulls his shirt collar down, craning his head back to bare his neck. There's a livid hairline scar on his breastbone, stretching down his chest under the collar. "I don't—know what—my head hurts." He blinks and runs his fingers through his hair, and then takes a deep breath in and out. In and out. There's no date at the corner of the screen, but Mike remembers the chest surgeries; they've skipped forward a couple of months, at least. The dark circles that Mike's gotten so used to are starting to come in under Chuck's eyes.

"…the headaches have gotten worse," he says, and he's obviously making an effort to keep his voice clear and his eyes focused. For a second the picture goes dark as he closes his eyes. "…They said—they found something in my lung last time they were operating, so they had to go in again, and I can breathe better now but it feels…weird." He snorts at himself, a tired half-laugh. "...'feels weird'. Wow, that's…that's some good science right there."

Blink.

Mike is in the background with a towel around his waist, drying his hair. The camera focus—Chuck's eyes—keep flicking over to him in the background. He leans in to the mirror self-consciously, voice lowered.

"…so," he says. "The break's been good. Time…ngh. Time to recuperate."

"Mm?" Young Mike turns back with a toothbrush in his mouth. "Whzzt?"

"Nothing, Mikey." Chuck rubs one temple. "Mnh. Just talking to myself."

"Oh." Mike shrugs. "…'kay." And Mike wants to grab his younger self and _shake_ him because it's _right there in front of him_ , but he's just turning away, finger-combing his hair, shrugging it off. On his own back, foreign but familiar, Mike sees the jagged gash he got the day before his sixteenth birthday, neatly closed with Deluxe skinbond but still puffy and fresh. For just a second the frustration in Mike's chest turns into something aching and old and never-quite-healed. This version of him is still a cadet. He can only have months between him and his promotion. His first mission.

"Two more," says Chuck to the mirror, and closes his eyes.

Blink

"Back in for another surgery tomorrow," says Chuck in the video, and sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. "…they fixed the neck problem, I guess. And the scars have cleared up okay, so…but I don't know what this one is even…" He pulls up a screen—it wobbles and glitches a little and he frowns at it until it steadies. There's a date on the screen, backwards but clear, and a jolt runs up Mike's spine—three weeks until the anniversary. Somewhere in Deluxe, maybe at the same second this video was being recorded, Kane must already be planning his promotion.

Chuck frowns at the screens, the scrolling text there, and then sighs. "…oh. The other leg." He smiles—it's half-hearted at best. "…last prosthetic though."

"Whatcha talking about?" Video-Mike throws an arm around Chuck's shoulders—the screen jolts out of existence as Chuck yelps and jumps. "Oh man, they got you some of those new holo-screens? I heard the other guys talking about them, I guess they got way better with this patch!"

In the mirror, Chuck's mouth curves into a proud, self-conscious little smile. Past-Mike doesn't notice.

"Yeah," says Chuck. "Yeah, they're…pretty cool."

"We get everything last, up in the barracks," past-Mike says, and it's a completely unrelated pang to see how casually he talks about Kane Co., about "the other guys", about the barracks Mike used to live in. Those things didn't used to hurt. He'd almost forgotten. "By the time they send us our downloads there'll be another one out."

"…yeah," Chuck says again, distantly, and his eyes flicker over himself in the mirror; over the faint scars on his arms and legs and chest and face, the almost imperceptible gleam of light in the pupil of his right eye. For a second his hands clench, white-knuckled, on the countertop. " _…always upgrading_."

Blink.

"This project was a waste of Kane Co. resources."

The face is familiar—the head of the project from the first video. There's cold disdain in his eyes.

"Your research will be confiscated and destroyed," he says, and the tone of his voice makes Mike's spine prickle with anger. The video feed—Chuck's eyes—won't stay on his face. It blurs, like a camera lens in the rain. His eyes flicker down to his hands instead, bandaged and knotted up in his lap.

Even in the video it's clear his hands are shaking, and Mike wants to track this guy down and punch him in the face. In the recording Chuck's voice sounds very, very quiet, trembling as hard as his hands. " _…I-I…I don't think…_ "

"Command, override 0. Open priority session."

The noise Chuck makes in the recording is awful, like somebody just punched him in the throat. His eyes snap up to the man's face again, his voice chokes out "—acknowledged, standing by for orders _what did you_ —"

"Assign registration holder: Kane, Abraham."

"Ah—a-acknowledged—what—"

"You will not discuss the details of this project with anyone but your registration holder, unless you have your registration-holder's explicit permission."

"Acknowledged—"

"If you spread your research to third parties or discuss classified Kane Co. information, you will report to R&D for _mandatory_ reprogramming and the information will be removed from your data banks. Do you understand?"

" _Acknowledged_." The word breaks, he sounds _terrified_ and Mike can feel his own hands shaking but it's not from fear. " _—stop—_ "

"Close session."

The video feed goes white and then black and then settles again. Chuck must be curled over on himself—the only thing on the screen is his knees in the familiar Kane Co. white and blue, a hand pressed to his stomach like he's going to be sick.

"You can report back to your pod," says the man's voice overhead. "…Your registration holder will contact you with any further priority orders."

"… _wh—what did you do to…_ "

" _Go back to your pod_."

"What was that, what did you do—?" He's breathing hard and fast and deep; in the corner of the video a faded alert flickers up, _CO2 levels decreasing, regulate respiration_. "I didn't write that, that wasn't—what did you _do_?!"

"All that should matter to you," says the old man coldly, and there's nothing but disappointment and disdain in his eyes. "…is if you don't follow your orders, I'm going to do it again."

In the present, Chuck winces away from the words—the video glitches, frozen on that face. When he closes his eyes and hunches in on himself, Mike is already moving forward, grabbing his shaking shoulder and pulling him in close. Chuck goes stiff and still for a second like he wants to pull away from the touch, then he jerks like he's waking up from a bad dream, breathes in deep and leans into it. When he curls himself in tight, making himself smaller so Mike can rest his chin in Chuck's hair, he can feel Chuck's hands shaking.

"…I'm gonna find that guy and I'm gonna make him apologize to you _,_ " he says finally, quietly, and feels Chuck give a weak sort of laugh. "What was his _damage_?"

"R&D is like that," Chuck says quietly. "…I mean…he took a risk, getting Kane to okay a proposal from some kid he'd never seen before, and it went wrong. 11% success, that's…not good. He had a whole department and now Kane probably still has him working on better garbage disposal in some crappy one-man lab off on the edge of the city."

"He's still a jerk."

Chuck sighs and doesn't answer. For a minute or two they just sit there, silent—then Chuck sniffs and pushes himself away, sitting up straight and raking his hair back with both hands to let it fall back in a rumpled mess.

"…so," he says. "…that's…what happened."

"They said…something about waking up," Mike says, and Chuck blinks and then looks away, lips thinning. "—waking up in surgery—?"

"I don't remember that," Chuck says, quick and abrupt. "It only happened once or twice and either I wiped it or they did. Doesn't matter. I don't remember."

He says it fast—too fast, maybe. Because he doesn't want to talk about it, or because he's lying to make Mike feel better? Either way, he obviously wants to keep Mike from worrying about it. Mike bites his tongue and doesn't ask. The few stories he's had time to read over the course of his life come back to mind in blurry sections—something about robots.

"You can feel stuff, though?"

"The skin still has nerves, and the muscles and stuff have synthetic ones." Chuck clenches a hand, staring down at his knuckles. "They kept as much of the original tissue as they could, and I left the surface tissue in my designs because I didn't want…whoever it was—whoever ended up—" he struggles for a second, then soldiers on. "…I wanted to keep the nerves in the skin, but the muscles and bones are, uh…organic polymers. Metal."

"I wondered why you were so heavy," Mike teases, and Chuck half-laughs, like he's been taken by surprise. Mike reaches out and takes one arm, running his fingers over the skin, squeezing a little like he's testing the give of the flesh under his hands. It feels almost real, real enough he never thought about it before. But maybe it is a little cooler, a little harder than a normal arm would be. He can't tell if he's imagining it or not, now. "…wow. Did you say this was…your research?"

"Well, I mean." Chuck waves the hand Mike's not holding, cheeks coloring slightly. "Heh. Some of it, yeah. They put a couple of theories together." The thinly-veiled pride in his voice makes a warm, stupid glow light up in Mike's chest.

"Mostly yours though," he says, half-guessing, and Chuck fiddles self-consciously with the hem of his shirt and chews on his lip to hide a smile, not answering. "Wow. Did I ever tell you you're a freaking genius?"

Chuck ducks his head and grins, wide and embarrassed. "…could stand to tell me more," he mumbles, and glances up from under his bangs. "…Hey, Mikey?"

"Yeah?"

"…thanks."

"What?" Mike blinks, confused. "—what for?"

Chuck stares at him, mouth hanging open, and then slumps back with a long, long sigh that trembles like a sob. When he answers, though, his voice is soft and steady.

"…nothing _,_ " he says, and picks up the hand Mike's not holding like it weighs a million pounds, scrubbing awkwardly at his face. "…nothing, I guess _._ "

"Cool." Mike stretches, twists in his seat and groans as his back pops. "Mmmngh I'm starving. Why does that weirdo always make trouble right before I'm gonna get something to eat?"

"Just to mess with you?" Chuck huffs out a laugh and pushes himself up. For just a second, he stands with his back straight and his shoulders pulled back, looking somewhere far away.

Then his back hunches and his shoulders draw into their nervous curve again, and things are almost normal. Mike lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding and gets up too. Everything is fine. His best friend is 90% metal, but he's still the same person he's ever been. He's hurt and scarred and exhausted, but he's still the same person he's ever been.

…somebody hurt him, right under Mike's nose, and that person deserves to pay. But Chuck is the same person he's ever been.

 _Do you still eat?_ Mike almost asks, and then realizes that's a really stupid question, that he's seen Chuck pack down meals twice the size of what Mike can handle. _Same as he ever was._ "Pizza?" he asks instead.

"Better than whatever Jacob's cooking," Chuck mutters, and rubs the back of his neck, grimacing. "Jeez, what a day. Holy—crap."

Mike almost grins at the cut-off space where the curse was obviously going to be, and then frowns instead as a thought occurs to him. "—hey, you didn't stop swearing because I—"

"I cleaned up my filthy fuckin' mouth because every time I didn't, you gave me that _look_ ," Chuck says wryly, and grins at Mike's instinctive wince. "Yeah, like that. My— _programming—_ " the word is sharp with hatred, sudden and bitter. "—only registered, like…three orders from you the whole time we've been down here, okay? It's cool."

"What?" A cold pit opens up in the bottom of Mike's stomach. "—what orders?"

Chuck cracks his knuckles ostentatiously, and then flicks his fingers out wide, popping up three different screens side by side by side. Mike's face looks back from all three of them.

" _Stick with me, okay? We'll be fine,_ " says Mike in the first screen, dirty and bruised, grinning like a maniac in Kane Co. white and blue with Motorcity spread out behind him. ( _Not a problem, dude,_ says Chuck's voice in the foreground, shaky with relief and terror, and Mike grins bright and wide and sunny.) Mike remembers that day, brilliant and sharp in his mind—remembers the way Chuck smiled back at him, wide-eyed and scared. He'd grabbed Mike's hand when they ran down, held on tight.

" _Stay alive,_ " says Mike in the second, panicky, wide-eyed and shaky with adrenaline. One side of the screen is dark and blurry—his right eye was swollen shut. " _Oh my god, talk to me—you okay? Chuck,_ are you okay?" ( _Mike,_ Chuck's voice gasps, and Mike's face crumples with relief, young and bruised and panicky, as one pale hand comes into frame to grab clumsily at his jacket. _'M okay, 's okay_ —) Chuck had broken a collarbone, in that first disastrous fight after Kane started sending bots down—cracked the arch of his cheekbone and ripped up one shoulder. Shot a bot with his slingshot at point-blank range and Mike had gotten there just in time to see him slam back and down into the ground and lie limp and still in a heap in the dirt. _Stay alive, stay alive._

" _Live fast,_ " says Mike in the third, and holds up a patch in white and blue, smiling like he's not sure he should. " _Live free._ " (… _me?_ Chuck asks, and he sounds so unsure, his hand shakes as he reaches out like there's anybody else in the world Mike would ask first. _But I'm just…_ )

"Those weren't orders," Mike says, but the words are distant and soft. It feels like the air's knocked out of him. "I was just—I just wanted—"

"It was important," says Chuck. "It mattered to you. Heh. Matters to me too. I like orders like _stay alive._ " He grins, one-sided and wobbly. "…I like orders like _stick with me._ That's why I took them." Mike stares at him, and his face must show how completely freaked out he still feels because Chuck sighs and rakes a hand through his hair. "Listen. Tell me to do something."

"No."

"Mikey, seriously. Just…anything."

"Uh…" Mike flounders for a second, then points at a wrinkled shirt sitting on the bedside table. "—pick that up."

"No."

They sit for a second, staring at each other. Then Chuck breaks down and laughs, shaking his head. "Told you so," he says. "I don't have to follow your orders, Mikey, seriously. I'm still me, and I've fixed a lot of the really messed up stuff, anything I could get into on my own I shut off. I only take the important ones."

"The Duke made you do things," Mike says, faster and shakier than he means to. "Stuff you didn't want to do."

Chuck's smile falls. "…yeah," he says, and…hesitates.

"You don't have to tell me," Mike says quickly. "Seriously, it's cool."

"No," says Chuck, sudden and sharp, almost fierce. "I said I'd tell you. I _trust_ you."

"You don't have to tell me everything to prove it, though," Mike argues. "—because I trust you too, dude, you know I do."

"He used a manual override."

Okay, so they're doing this. Mike sits back and tries to choke down the jittery nerves bubbling up in the back of his throat. Chuck's fingers tap out staccato patterns on his knees—typing, maybe, on some invisible keypad.

"The person I'm registered to should be the only one who can tell me what to do, but there's an override built in if it's an emergency. If _Kane Co. needs me._ " The pure acid in the words is startling. "Override zero."

"That's what he said." Mike frowns, trying to think back. "…command…override 0."

And then he looks up at Chuck and sees him staring straight ahead, frozen, eyes unfocused, and realizes his mistake.

"Oh," he starts, "—no, wait—"

"Override acknowledged," says Chuck evenly. "Standing by for orders."

"What? No!" Mike grabs one of Chuck's shoulders and shakes him a little—Chuck doesn't resist, but as soon as Mike lets go he sits back to where he was, staring ahead. "Wake up!"

Chuck blinks once, slowly, and then again, shaking his head sharply like he's clearing away cobwebs. His eyes focus.

"Wow," he says, shakier than ever. "— _wow_ it's—different when you do it."

"What?" Mike shakes him again a little bit, scanning Chuck's face—he doesn't look mad or upset, just numb. Kind of rattled. "What do you mean different? Dude, you okay?"

"Uh…" Chuck looks down at himself. Swings his feet and works his shoulders a little bit, like he's testing them out. "…yeah. I think so. It's just…stronger, I guess, when it comes from you. When the Duke did it I could shake it off—well, eventually, if he didn't give me orders, but Iiiii don't think that's happening when you do it."

"I am never saying that again," says Mike fervently. "Come on, let's get outta here."

Dutch is out buying new paints when they go downstairs—Texas and Julie are arguing about something when they get there, but they're both more than willing to break for pizza and together the four of them troop down to the cars and head off across town. The normalcy is an incredible relief. By the time they get there and have found a table, Chuck has gotten embroiled in Julie and Texas's argument, and Mike sits back and listens as they debate through dinner. Julie and Chuck are both arguing the almost completely pointless argument that the hero of their movie of choice last night couldn't possibly have pulled off one of his spy tricks—Texas is standing firm that he _can_ because it's _awesome_ and anyway, he's super smart and like a hacker and junk.

Mike just sits back and laughs, occasionally throwing in a comment on one side or the other, until the waitress shows up with the check. Julie and Texas both look up when she arrives—Chuck, agonized by Texas's complete refusal to understand, is still talking. "—not how a system like that even works, the _time_ he would've had to put in—"

"Chuck," says Mike absently, and pats him on the shoulder. "…dude. Shhh." Chuck huffs and shuts ups.

"I'll grab the bill this time," says Julie. "Heard you guys had to deal with the Duke today, it's the least I can do."

"Jules, you don't hafta—"

"Mike," says Julie, and gives him the exact same pat on the shoulder he just gave Chuck. "Dude. Shhh."

She winks. Mike takes the point, and shuts up.

After dinner Texas has a "something" to go to that is definitely not a fight club, totally not a fight club, okay guys? And Julie needs to head back up to Deluxe for some kind of meeting, so Mike and Chuck wander back out to Mutt and pull up next week's shopping list. Part commissions for gangs, parts they need for their cars, Jacob's groceries, and a new door to replace the one Texas kicked down after a more-than-usually exciting mission.

Chuck is already tired, or at least he sounds like it—he's sitting up and talking, but when he gets quiet like this it usually means he's worn out and he either wants coffee or sleep. Mike usually tries to make sure it's the latter, because the last thing Chuck needs is more coffee and less sleep, but every time he asks if they should head home Chuck shakes his head and pulls up the next thing on the list and heck, it's nice to go out driving with him again.

And then a call pops up on their dash.

"I've talked to you enough for a year," says Mike, as soon as the Duke picks up, before he can get a word in edgewise. "You get a minute, and then I'm not picking up calls from you after this for at least a week or two. I don't care what kinda crazy crap you want to say, you can find somebody else to screw with."

"Oo, I think I hear a little bit of a _short temper_ in here. Domestic strife?" The Duke peers around. "I don't hear screaming. Did Legs decide he didn't wanna ride with you?"

"One, my friends are none of your business," says Mike sharply, and the Duke laughs. "Two, Chuck's fine. We're fine. If you thought that was gonna cause a problem, you don't know us."

"If you say so." The Duke makes a show of yawning. "—anyway. I heard Rayon wants something made you don't have parts for."

He's obnoxious, but business is business. Mike rattles off the list of components they're looking for—the Duke scratches his beard contemplatively and then pulls up one of his own data screens and types something out.

"Coordinates," he says, and Chuck jumps as a map pops up on one of his screens. "You're welcome."

"Nobody said thank you," says Mike. "We'll take it. Keep your goons out of our way."

"Mike!" Chuck is already starting as the call closes. "—this is right through Amazon territory, _and_ it's from the Duke so who knows how—"

"Hey man, come on." Mike leans back, buckling in. "Nothing's gonna happen."

"What if it does?!"

"It's not gonna."

"Oh, yeah," Chuck says, high with panic and dripping with sarcasm. "Sounds good! Wow, I am totally not worried anymore! _Wow._ "

"Dude, calm down _._ "

Chuck is apparently so offended he doesn't talk for the rest of the drive, and he even keeps his mouth stubbornly shut as Mike takes the single winding road that threads between two gang territories to one of the Duke's remote junkyards. It takes until they get back to the hideout for him to forgive Mike enough to talk to him again, but that might just be because he's _definitely_ tired now, round-shouldered and feet dragging. It's been a long, long day. Mike unloads the parts they got from the back, drops them on the tables where they go, and he and Chuck wander upstairs.

Chuck gets the top bunk of the ancient bunk-bed they dragged out of the trash, because when he sits up on the bottom bunk his head slams into the sagging mattress and because that's how it's always been. Mike likes to be on the level by the floor, and after the first couple nights Chuck doesn't even worry too much that he might fall off and die in the middle of the night.

The routine is comfortingly familiar. Texas showers in the mornings, Mike and Chuck shower at night before bed—if they shower at all, Claire occasionally cracks to Julie when she thinks none of the other Burners can hear her. Chuck showers first because he's faster, and Mike showers second while Chuck kicks the discarded clothes and car parts around their floor into some kind of order. Switch rooms, get changed, fall into bed. After this many years, it's almost down to an art-form.

Mike reaches down and flicks off the lights. For once he feels wrung out enough he might actually sleep—they have a routine, yeah, but both of them kind of suck at sleeping. Mike is more of the "lie awake for three hours, get up and go beat up a punching bag until four AM" kind of guy, but he usually hears Chuck wake up gasping at least two or three times while he's lying awake. Then there'll be a soft green glow as Chuck opens up a screen to work on something for fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes, and then he'll lie back again and get another hour of sleep before the next abrupt, panicky snap back to consciousness.

Tonight though, Mike is only lying there for a couple of silent minutes before he hears Chuck shift uneasily on the other bed.

"…hey, Mikey? _"_

"Yeah?"

"…today was really weird and crazy and—we're still cool, right?"

"Dude, 'course we are."

"Okay _._ " Chuck takes a deep breath—the springs creak as he turns over. "…okay."

Silence falls for a long minute. Mike closes his eyes, and tries not to think about thinking about going to sleep, and he's just starting to get somewhere close to relaxing when Chuck abruptly shifts again.

"—listen, I'm sorry I never told _—_ "

"…Chuck, it's _fine_. Go to sleep." Mike buries his face in his pillow. If Chuck answers, he doesn't hear. Still, breathing silence falls. Mike smiles, sighs fondly and tries to relax.

He must succeed at relaxing at some point, because the next thing he knows he's sitting up, awake and ready to go with a thrill of new energy electrifying his muscles.

"Chuck." He reaches up and thumps the underside of the other sagging mattress. "Hey, let's go!"

Not even a grumble. Usually he gets a couple of half-coherent growls at least. Mike pushes himself out of bed, stretches and turns around to lean on the side of the other mattress. Chuck is spread out across the bed in a mess of skinny arms and legs, blankets hanging off one leg, breathing slow and quiet. He looks knocked out—with his hair tousled and out of his face, the shadows under his eyes are dark and clear. Mike reaches out and pokes his forehead gently—nothing.

"Chuckles. Hey. Hey Chuck. Wake up."

Chuck's eyes snap open so abruptly Mike jerks his hand back. For a second they seem to glint brighter, a ring of blue-white light flares around the pupils. Then they're just their normal pale blue and Chuck jerks upright with a startled yelp. "Mike! Jeez you're gonna give me a—"

It's hard to describe what happens next—like a stutter, a split second of frozen stillness. Chuck freezes mid-word, his eyes dim to dark, dull blue-green and then there's a bright, sharp flash of blue-white again, Chuck jerks sharply and he's talking again like nothing happened. "—heart attack!"

"What?"

"I said you're gonna give me a—"

"No, I heard you." Mike leans in, staring—Chuck leans back, looking unnerved. "Your eyes did something weird."

"I—oh?" Chuck sounds confused, more than a little bit nervous, like he's not sure if "weird" is okay.

"Yeah, they…I dunno, you stopped moving and they went all dark for a second."

"What?" Chuck frowns and pushes his hair out of his face. "Right now?"

Mike leans in, squinting—the glow in Chuck's eyes is steady, barely visible even in the shadow of his hand and the dim light of the room. "Uh…no."

"It sounds like…" Chuck stops, still groggy and swaying a little, and then groans long and frustrated and pushes himself up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. " _Shoot_. Agh, this is the last thing I need right now."

"What? What's going on?"

"It's a micro-refresh," Chuck says grumpily, "—and it shouldn't happen while I'm in the middle of stuff, and it shouldn't take long enough to—" jerk, flicker. "—interrupt me when I'm talking. I just did it again, didn't I?"

"Yeah."

"Shit." Chuck pulls up a screen and then stops abruptly. "…Mike?"

"What?"

"Did somebody just turn off the lights?"

"What?" Mike looks around—the room isn't exactly bright, but it's certainly not dark. Light is coming in from the hallway outside, lighting the room up dim gold. "Uh…no?"

"Oh. Okay." Chuck blinks, then blinks again, harder, widening his eyes and staring around. "—my eyes just shut off. Gimme a second."

"They _what_?!" Mike's voice cracks a little bit and Chuck jumps, staring around blindly. Mike forces himself to lower his voice. "What?Is this supposed to happen?"

"No," says Chuck. He sounds way more annoyed and way less freaked out than Mike would be if his eyes just suddenly stopped working. "Something is f-f-f-screwing with my systems and they're trying to throw it out and I—" another hitching second of silence. "—get to deal with the side effects. Like a germ giving my organics a fever." He jerks again—blinks, and the dullness vanishes from his eyes. "There."

"So this is like…you're sick?"

"Somebody gave me a bug." Chuck holds out his hands—the screen in front of him expands, widening into multiple feeds, moving too fast for Mike to follow. "…not just a regular bug for a regular computer, something engineered to—" he stops, and for a second Mike thinks he's glitching again but it's realization that's frozen him in place this time. A second later he's throwing himself back on the bed and groaning, dragging his hands down his face. "—the _Duke._ Again! He's messing with me, _again._ Is he—jacking my visual feed?! Fuck! Sorry, but— _fuck_!"

"He's what?"

"He's in my eyes!" Chuck hisses a couple more curses that make Mike's eyebrows rise under his bangs. "—so the cameras all over our stuff last time weren't good enough, he thinks he can—dammit! I took a _shower_ last night! He told you what I am and then he hijacked my eyes so he could watch the fallout!"

"So he's—what, he's listening in right now?" If he is, Mike has a couple of choice words to say—as soon as whatever's going on is cleaned up, he definitely owes somebody a punch in the face.

"He can't hear anything, there's nothing going on with my ears except my comm implant and that's on a separate system." Chuck blinks again. "But he can see whatever I'm looking at—see, now I know it's there I can feel it in my eyes aagh that's so _gross!_ And I mean—he just hacked me? He just hacked me. One of my neural feeds, that's—it's not like there's enough cyborgs around for there to be rules or something, but that's just...rude!"

It would almost be funny if it wasn't so completely not okay—Chuck doesn't look scared so much as he's just really _offended,_ like somebody stole food off his plate or made fun of Mutt. Mike, who's still shaky on what exactly is happening or how, is at least kind of comforted by the fact that Chuck's more angry than scared—that means it's bad, but it's not…"bots in the city, we're all gonna die everybody panic" bad. Chuck can handle it, it's just really really irritating, and that means it's okay to relax again.

"You should write it," Mike says, and watches Chuck flick through files, looking frustrated.

"What?"

"Cyborg rules."

"Ha ha," says Chuck sarcastically, and slumps down on the side of the bed, covering his eyes with both hands, rubbing at them like there's something stuck in one. "Auaughgh. Man, that's just— _nasty._ How am I supposed to work when I can feel whatever weird, gross code he bought messing around in my system?"

"No, I'm serious here dude."

" _I'm gonna punch him right in the face_ ," says Chuck, more to himself than to Mike, and then blinks as his brain catches up with his ears. "—serious about what?"

"You should make me some rules," says Mike, and pulls himself up on the bed, swinging himself up to sit next to Chuck on the side of the mattress with their feet dangling. "…so I know what I shouldn't do."

"You wouldn't know _how_ to do most of the stuff I can think of," says Chuck plainly, and taps on a file. "—there he is. Yeah, right before he told you, I must've automatically connected to his network and…gimme a sec."

Mike leans over to watch, and then jumps a little bit as instead of starting into his usual rapid storm of typing Chuck drops his hands, leaving the screens where they are. He slumps forward and goes still all over, not blinking, barely breathing; after a second his lips start to move minutely, mumbling so quietly Mike can't make out individual words. On the screen, things reorder themselves, flash and vanish, initialize and load and run. It's like watching his brain laid out on a screen. Mike stares, completely confused but fascinated, as the file the Duke sent unfolds into a network of processes and subprocesses, then slowly starts to deconstruct itself, eating away like paper in a fire.

It can't take more than two or three minutes, overall, and there's way too much going on to follow but it's still cool to watch. By the time Chuck breathes in deep and finally blinks again, Mike is leaning in against his shoulder, watching with interest as the last traces of the original program burn away.

Chuck glances down at the screen and blinks—a loading bar pops up, flickering through strings of numbers and letters, _virus scan in progress_. It's an incongruous and familiar bright blue-white compared to the black and green of the rest of the screen, and there's text scrolling along the bottom of it as it loads.

"…make your day a DELUXE day," Mike reads, half-laughing. "Upgrade your coverage now for full— _"_

"Kane Co. sucks, but they've got good antivirus," says Chuck. He sounds a little bit ragged, like he sounds when he's been up late working and Mike catches him staggering in at five AM—like words are hard. "Wow. See if I ever accept a file transfer from the Duke again. What a dick."

"Well, nice to get the morning off to a nice, no-stress kinda start," Mike says brightly, and slides down off the side of the bed. Chuck snorts and then slides down after him, staggering a little bit. "You okay?"

"I'll, uh…I'll get there." Chuck shakes his head, scrubbing at his eyes one last time. "I can't believe he outed me like that just so he could watch you freak out about it."

"I didn't freak out," says Mike, and then wilts a little as Chuck gives him a look. "…that wasn't freaking out! I was totally calm."

"You did good," Chuck allows, and grabs one of his shirts and a new pair of jeans. "Way better than I figured you would. Ha…I worked myself up so bad about how you would react I forgot you were…you."

"What that supposed to mean?" Mike bumps his shoulder, grinning. Chuck shoves him back.

"You're dumb."

" _You're_ dumb."

"Your face is dumb."

"I know, I know. Go get dressed already."

Chuck waves him off and vanishes into the bathroom to change.

It's almost noon by the time they wander down the stairs. Without any recent bot attacks to dictate sleep schedules, with no sunlight filtering through their area of the Deluxe ceiling, the Burners sleep when they feel like it and get up at any hour of the day, and it's not weird to see somebody come down yawning and disheveled at 11:30.

"Morning, sunshine." Jacob slides a plate down the counter as Mike settles down at one of the stools—Mike opens his mouth to ask what the dark spots in the pancakes in front of him are, then closes it again. "Breakfast for lunch. Eat up."

"Guess Jacob's…blueberries…? Are ripe?" Chuck is poking dubiously at his own plate of pancakes as Jacob vanishes back into the kitchen.

"I dunno, man." Mike takes a bite and grimaces a little bit, then swallows hard. "…doesn't taste like blueberries? I mean it's…not bad."

Chuck takes a bite and then another one, then seems to decide that his best chance is to just eat as much as possible as fast as possible. Across the room, Texas is chugging down muscle mulch, sweaty from his morning workout. Dutch is doodling in a battered sketchbook in the corner, looking more awake than anybody should at this time of day. Mike absently checks trackers—up in Deluxe, Julie is in Nine Lives on her way down.

"…I'm gonna go see the Duke again today," he says finally.

Chuck chokes on his pancakes. Mike keeps going, faster now, before he can swallow the food in his mouth and start talking. "I'm gonna go and tell him he can't screw with us like this." He glances over at Texas and Jacob and leans in. "He can't do stuff like what he did last night, especially not after he sold me out."

"Mike!" Chuck's voice cracks. "No!"

"If you just think about it, it's a good idea—"

"No! It's _not_ a good idea!" Chuck pushes his seat back and starts to stand up, shaking his head. "—There are really good odds you won't even make—"

"Chuck, just—listen. Sit down." Mike leans in as Chuck, shoulders tense and mouth bent in an unhappy frown, sits jerkily back down—lowers his voice. "—I know it's dangerous, okay? That's why I don't want you to go."

"What?!"

"Dude, keep it _down_!" Mike glances around—none of the other Burners seem to have heard. "…I'm not putting you in danger. None of you should go with me on this, especially not you. You gotta stay here."

"But—" Chuck shakes his head again, but it's sharper this time, jerky. A sort of harsh shiver snaps through his whole body. "— _no_ , but—I should—I have to—"

"Uh…Chuck?"

" _Stick with me,_ " Chuck mumbles, and reaches up to his head with shaking hands. " _Sit down listen go to bed quieter wake up wait for me talk to me not going live free keep it get down get in stay alive—_ " The words come out in a long, unbroken rush. "— _priority priority priority error priority—_ "

"Chuck? Hey—"

Chuck makes a loud, strangled noise and doubles over, holding his head and shaking all over. He's still talking, fragmented words that don't make any sense, repeating _"—error ERROR_ —" like the words hurt—

"What in the heck is goin' on out here?"

Jacob comes out of the kitchen at a jog, towel thrown over his shoulder and soap on his hands. Mike pulls his hands away from Chuck's shoulders guiltily and stares up at Jacob helplessly, worried and confused. "Jacob! I-I dunno, he—"

" _System malfunction—_ "

"System diagnostic," Jacob says urgently, and shoulders past Mike like he's not there. "Priority command: run system diagnostic."

Chuck freezes and then, very slowly, uncurls from himself.

"…acknowledged," he says, voice ragged. "Retrieving."

"What happened?" Mike tries to step forward—Jacob's pointy elbow hits him in the gut. "Ow!"

"Kid, you just stand back there and _keep your trap shut_ ," Jacob says firmly, and slides into the seat next to Chuck, wincing as he bends his creaky knees. " _Uhhf_. Priority inquiry: current command session."

"Mikhail Chilton. Registration holder, level one session."

Jacob turns back to Mike and frowns. " _Mike_ …" he growls.

"What did I do?!" Mike bursts out, "—is he okay?" And then, second priority but almost as urgent, "—wait, you _knew_?"

"System diagnostic complete," says Chuck quietly.

"Show alerts."

Screens spread out in front of them, full of tiny, flickering writing. Jacob scans it, grumbling to himself under his breath, tracing a finger from line to line.

"…okay," he says after a long minute, and drags his hands down his face. "Al _right._ Kid, listen up and say _exactly_ what I say. Command: cancel override session directives."

Mike repeats obediently as Jacob keeps talking, rattling off chains of protocols and commands. Every so often Chuck will pitch in with a _command invalid_ or _not authorized_ or _acknowledged, processing_ and Jacob will growl or curse or nod and sit back to wait. When Mike opens his mouth to say something that isn't repeating Jacob's commands he gets sternly shushed, and eventually he stops trying. He's in trouble and if he's lucky it'll get explained later why. That's something he's used to at least. Cadets weren't expected to understand why they were assigned punishment detail, just that their performance had been sub-par and they needed to show improvement.

"…aaaand…close session," Jacob says finally, and sits back with a heavy sigh. "…command: recalibrate. Jeez. You kids..."

"Command: recalibrate." Mike leans in, worried—Chuck is still sitting still, looking straight ahead. "…Chuck? Uh…you okay?"

"Soft reboot," Jacob says, and pulls Mike down by the back of his jacket, settling him down in the seat on his other side. "He'll be back up in a couple minutes. Now what the _damn hell_ did you think you were doing?!"

Mike flinches. _I don't know_ isn't a good enough answer, has never been a good enough answer. Deluxe has taught him that much, at least. "—I…" he shakes his head helplessly. "What _did_ I do?"

"You used a primary override, you knucklehead!" Jacob whaps him on the back of the skull. "The free will switch was turned _off._ He's in the _car_ but he's not _driving._ Is this getting through to you, kid?"

"It was an accident!"

Jacob gives him a long look. "…okay," he says, "…tell me what happened. All of it."

So Mike does. The Duke, the long drive home, the explanation Chuck gave him, the long slow process that turned almost nine-tenths of him from flesh to metal and wires. The accidental override.

"—he woke up a second later and he seemed like he was okay!" Mike drags a hand down his face, feeling the guilt burn slow and thick down his spine. "…he…said he was fine. He acted like…like he always does."

"Except he followed every single order you gave him," Jacob says, and crosses his arms. "…You didn't notice, did you?"

"No!"

Jacob snorts and shakes his head, but the harshness is gone from his voice when he says, "—you're just like your dad sometimes, kid."

Something painful and warm knots up in Mike's stomach. Jacob never talks about—

"—anyway, you made a pretty big mess here," says Jacob abruptly, and turns away. "What did you tell him? 'Wake up'?"

"Y…yeah."

"That didn't end the session." Jacob looks at Mike's face for a second, then sighs and takes pity. "…look. You gotta tell a computer when it starts doing something and when it stops doing something. You told his brain 'start taking orders', but 'wake up' ain't the same as ' _stop_ taking orders'. You got me?"

"Uh…yeah."

"I cancelled everything you told him to do while he was under," Jacob says, and raises a hand, ticking things off on his fingers. "…told him to ask you for confirmation before he takes any more override orders from you, checked his brain was doin' okay after all the ass-backwards orders you crammed in there and closed the session. With all the new tech and syntax and crap they're using up there now, that's about all I could figure out to do. But you gotta swear to me—"

"I'm never doing that again," Mike says immediately, and Jacob nods. "I didn't mean to. I would _never_ do that on purpose."

"Not even if you thought it would save his life."

Mike opens his mouth, then hesitates. Jacob gives him a fierce look.

"If you'll do it for a good reason, you'll do it for a bad one," he says. "Unless he needs somethin' done and his stupid programming won't let him do it without you. Never."

"…never," Mike repeats, and it feels like a promise. "Yeah."

"…never what?"

Chuck sounds groggy and unsteady, like he just woke up from a nap. He sits up and groans, reaching up to his head, then flicks his hair back for a second to stare from Jacob to Mike.

"…what…happened?"

"You hit a feedback loop," Jacob growls, and reaches over to ruffle up Chuck's hair. "…how you feel, kid?"

"I…" Chuck groans again, very quietly. "…bad."

"Go lie down," Jacob advises, and elbows at Mike a little. Mike shifts over and lets Jacob slide out of his seat. "You like mint?"

"Mint what?"

"Tea." Jacob shrugs. "—I know you're a coffee man, but last time I heard caffeine doesn't do a lot for feedback." He frowns over his shoulder at the door to his kitchen. "…I've got chamomile-cinnamon too—"

"Mint." Another wince, like thinking is painful. "…mint's…good. Yeah. Sure."

"I'll get you some." Jacob turns to Mike, who resists the urge to sit up straight and salute. "You get him back upstairs."

"Yessir," says Mike, thoroughly chagrined, and scoots cautiously over toward Chuck, reaching out a hand as Jacob vanishes back into his kitchen, shaking his head and grumbling to himself. Chuck barely seems to have realized he was there—when Mike's hand touches his shoulder he jumps and yelps, then crumples back down with a soft, pained sound. Mike winces too and pulls his hand away. "—sorry, buddy."

"… _s'kay_ ," Chuck says blearily, and takes a deep breath, like every word is an effort. "…I'm gonna... _"_

"Yeah." It feels too…proprietary, too authoritative to take him by the shoulder or grab him by the arm to pull him up—a little awkwardly, Mike reaches out and takes one skinny hand, and Chuck stiffens for a second and then relaxes and lets himself be pulled upright. He follows Mike with his head down, and Mike catches a glimpse of his eyes under his hair and sees that they're closed.

The knowledge that this stupid, brilliant kid still _trusts_ him is somewhere between totally amazing and unbearably painful. Mike takes a breath, deeper and shakier than he really means to, and then squeezes Chuck's hand and starts walking again, off into the dark and the quiet.

* * *

The other Burners are waiting when Mike comes back out of the room. He doesn't quite manage to look at any of them head-on. Julie's there too, and from the way she leans away from Dutch as he comes in, they've been talking—she'll know what happened, by now.

"…he's fine," Mike says.

"…okay…" says Dutch slowly, dubiously. Julie has her arms crossed, and there's something about the sharpness of her eyes that makes Mike remember the day she brought Chuck back made Mike look her in the eyes and give full, formal answers. Makes him remember the tone to her voice when she asked, _can you take him now?_ And then when he hesitated, laughing a little, worried and confused, _Cadet Chilton, take him from me._

Julie stares at him. Mike looks away.

Unfortunately, this leads the eyes straight to the only person he hasn't looked at yet. Texas is staring at him with utter confusion in his eyes, brows furrowed like Mike is a difficult problem that he hasn't figured out yet.

"Okay Tiny, what happened?"

Mike opens his mouth and then closes it again slowly.

"…I messed up."

Jacob, on his way past in the other direction with a cracked cup of tea, shakes his head and claps Mike on the shoulder in mute commiseration.

"Not an answer, dude," Dutch says firmly. "What _happened_?"

"I shouldn't…" Mike hesitates. "…it's his…" problem. His secret. What are you even supposed to call that? _Our friend is mostly robotic and I technically own him and I've been hurting him and controlling him by accident I don't know what I did I'm really sorry._ "I can't tell you guys. Sorry."

"We can't just not talk about it." Dutch crosses his arms. "When he comes out here..."

"He can tell you if he wants," says Mike firmly. "It's not my story to tell."

Things go sort of almost back to normal, after that. Everybody's talking more quietly, every so often somebody will glance up toward the door to the bedrooms. Mike sits back in one of the corners, taps one foot jerkily against the rising tide of self-hatred and overflowing energy, and thinks. _Shhhh_ and _calm down_ and _go to sleep_ , those weren't orders, were they? They weren't— _orders,_ they were just things you said, things nobody was supposed to feel obligated to obey, and he'd just assumed Chuck was going along with it, that he was being quieter because he was tired, that whatever was wrong he'd totally fixed it. How many other not-orders had he given while Chuck was under that he didn't remember?

Julie gives him a mug of tea at some point. Mike is so out of it he barely remembers to mumble something that sounds like a "thank you". The tea gets cold on the rickety end-table. Mike taps his foot and thinks.

They're sitting in strained peace for fifteen minutes before the door creaks open very quietly and Chuck edges out into the light. When he sees everybody sitting around waiting he pales and hesitates, but then he sees Mike sitting hunched in a corner the tension in him breaks. His shoulders slump. He picks his way through the room and stops a few feet from Mike like he's not sure he's allowed to go closer.

"…sorry," he says, very quietly. "I messed up."

" _You_ messed up?" Mike's voice cracks a little bit, disbelieving. "—no, dude, this was all my fault."

"What was?"

Chuck jumps and whips around. Texas is watching him. Dutch is still over on the couch, but he's leaning forward, watching steadily. Julie looks quietly unhappy, but she's watching too. _Transfer, Julie Kapulsky_ …she has to know already. Has to have known for a while.

"It's a long story," says Chuck, uncomfortable, "—and, I mean—I was stupid, it's no big deal." Mike opens his mouth to cut in because it is _totally_ a big deal and he wasn't stupid at all—Chuck glances over at him and Mike immediately recognizes the _please shut up Mike please don't even get started_ look. He shuts his mouth again.

"If it's your problem, it's our problem," says Dutch.

"I—but…"

"Spill," says Texas firmly, and that's that.

Mike is steeled for the entire, emotionally-draining mess of a story, but Chuck just lays out the bare bones this time; Deluxe, Kane Co., experiments, cyborg. The Duke, then an accidental override, then the conflicting orders and the breakdown. Mike is about to open his mouth to take the blame when Chuck says, quietly, "—it wasn't Mike's fault," and he freezes, choking on the words. "He didn't know." He glances at Julie. "…I should've told him."

Julie takes a slow breath through her nose. "It's not always bad to keep things a secret," she says evenly.

"Can you do cool robot stuff?" This from Texas, who has been standing there frowning intensely at Chuck for a long time, apparently processing the new information. "Can you shoot missiles? Have you been holding out on us."

Chuck holds up his arm. "I mean…I could always shoot missiles. You've seen me."

"What? No."

"Plasma bolts are a—"

"No, like _real_ missiles!"

"Uh…"

"No, Texas," Julie says, longsuffering. "Stop bugging him."

Texas subsides, frowning.

"Are there other people like you?" Dutch sounds intrigued—his sketches turned to careful templates of machinery while Chuck talked, and now they've devolved into doodles of what looks like a human skull overlaid with circuits. "They gotta have tried again, right? I mean…how did we not hear about this? Why have we not got cyborg ultra-elites down here kickin' our butts all the time?"

"The project is discarded," Julie says. "Kane scrapped it and fired most of the staff."

"That's good," says Mike, more viciously than he really means to, "—they deserve it."

"They _threw it out_?" Dutch looks pained by the thought. "The whole thing? After one prototype?"

"Kane Co. does not _tolerate_ failure!" Julie recites, in an almost frightening imitation of Kane's disdainful growl. "Of course he got rid of it."

"Okay, but," Texas interjects. "—they messed up his brain! That was _really dumb_. I mean, that's why they wanted him, right? His brain!" There's a collective wince from everybody who's not Texas at the words _messed up his brain_ , but Chuck doesn't seem to care. He's got a hand under his hair, slowly rubbing at his temples, eyes closed.

"Kane was never good at thinking ahead," Jacob says, and there's that weird, almost fond aggravation to his voice. "…And besides, he doesn't care about the people who make his ideas happen, he just wants them done. He's all full of big ideas he doesn't know how to realize, so he threatens smart kids into doing it for him. Half of his R&D is coerced."

"… _I volunteered._ "

There's a second of collective silence, before all eyes turn slowly to Chuck. He's sitting curled up in his seat, knees pulled up to his chest. He looks…tired. Not miserable, not happy, just exhausted.

"…They told me it was an honor to experience it first-hand," he says, quiet and level. "Y'know. Because it was going to make a super-soldier. So." He gives a shaky, barely-there smile. "…could finally have kept up with Mike."

The bottom drops out of Mike's stomach. The sick lurch must show on his face, because Chuck looks up and immediately stops smiling.

"Oh—Mikey, no, I didn't—"

"It was just a joke, Mike," Julie says.

"That's not why I took it," Chuck says hurriedly. "They told me about all the ways it would make my life great and how they'd give me my own research department when it worked and…all kinds of stuff." He hesitates, and then admits, very quietly, "…and…they said I could come live in the barracks with you."

"Kane didn't let anybody but cadets—"

"I woulda been one." Chuck shrugs. "…I mean. Kinda." He slumps down, dropping his head down onto his knees. " _…shut up, Mike."_

Mike shuts up.

"Okay but that's _awesome,_ " says Texas. He's been mostly quiet for the proceedings, processing things as the others talk—now he's grinning, wide and crooked and dangerous. "Texas wants robo-arms. Chuck you gotta make me robo-arms."

"What? No!" Chuck sits up straight like he's been electrocuted. "No, are you nuts?!"

"Come _on_ , you just got cool and now you're bein' lame again, just think about it."

"No!"

"—with robot arms that shoot—"

" _No_!"

"—and totally kicking their butts and they'd be like _ahhhhhhh Texas he's so coooool_ ghkk." Texas falls back on the couch in a dramatic simulation of the imaginary defeat of his enemies, clutching at his chest. "—like that."

"You don't want this," says Chuck, and there's a strain of bitterness under the words, sharp and painful. "Seriously, it's not worth—look, even if it was a good idea, which it's not _,_ we don't have supplies down here, or—or surgeons, or the tech to do the neuroprogramming. Kane trashed the whole thing and they only made one set of the prosthetics they gave me, I'm _one of a kind_." The bitterness and sarcasm are open that time, but Texas doesn't seem to notice.

"Kay," he says, unphased. "New plan. _Arm trade._ BOOM! Chuck gets buff. BOOM! Texas gets robo-arms."

"Boom," says Chuck, "—Texas's arms are too skinny for his body for the rest of his life because metal muscles don't get bigger when you work out."

Texas deflates. " _Seriously?_ "

"Seriously."

Texas subsides, frowning, undoubtedly trying to think of a way around this new obstacle.

"Besides," Chuck says, and crosses his arms, affecting a tone of lofty dignity that's strongly reminiscent of his Lord Vanquisher voice. "…you can't just have my prosthetics. I dunno what you meatbag humans think is 'rude', but us superhumans are very private about our personal tech."

There's a moment of pure silence, and then Mike snorts and he and Chuck are both laughing. The other three catch on just a second later and then all five of them are laughing, longer and harder than the joke really warrants. Everything is funny after the grimness and tension of a couple minutes ago.

"I'm tellin' you," says Mike, when he finally gets his breath back. "… _'How not to offend your cyborg best friend_ '. Write the book, dude."

"Cyborg Etiquette," Julie says, and spreads her hands in front of her as though looking at the sweeping glory of the theoretical e-novel cover. "By Chuck (Chuck), Actual Cyborg."

"You gotta have a last name to write a book," says Texas wisely, and frowns. "—yeah. Pretty sure mom said so one time. If you don't got a name you're breakin' the law."

"You can be a Chilton if you want," Mike offers, and nods in satisfaction. "…hey, that sounds pretty good. Two 'Ch' names in a row."

"I have a last name," Chuck says, and punches Mike's shoulder. "Shut up, dude. I'd have to go hunt it down I guess, but it's gotta be in the records somewhere."

"Okay," says Texas. "I figured it out. You just gotta make me some robo-arms."

"That's the _first_ thing you said!" Chuck sounds agonized and on the edge of another laughing fit, both at the same time. "And all the reasons I can't do that are still reasons I can't do it, dude!"

"He's not gonna leave you alone about it," Dutch says, with the weary certainty of a man who has heard a thousand different plans for a hundred different machines and vehicles and has learned to resign himself to the inevitable. "Make him somethin' shiny, he'll forget about it for a bit."

"Hey!"

"Chapter one: don't hack into his eyes," Mike is listing off, counting on his fingers, "—it's rude. Don't call him a robot, that's _really_ rude."

"No overrides," Julie says, a little pointedly, but with good humor. Mike winces a little. "Just don't do it. But if it's an accident, it's polite to apologize."

"Don't ask for his blueprints," Chuck adds, as Texas argues with Dutch over top of him. "—don't ask how much of him is metal. Or where." He grimaces—Mike's eyebrows rise.

"I didn't do that," he says, and then it clicks. "Oh. _Oh,_ holy crap, did he seriously—?"

"He totally did." Chuck's head tilts—he's rolling his eyes, if Mike had to guess. "I think he—"

And then the lights abruptly cut red. Mike is jumping up before he even thinks about it, before the siren even starts to wail. It's been weeks since Kane attacked, and there's been plenty of drama since then but some part of Mike has been on edge for this ever since the second they beat the last wave of bots. The other Burners are already on the move, rushing for their cars and taking off with spitting trails of exhaust.

The signal is coming from miles away—five or ten minutes away, even at Mike's lead-footed pace. Mike has time as he drives to cool down from the immediate wave of adrenaline that hit when he heard the sirens go off—time to settle into that rushing, relentless frame of mind where everything is too clear and moving slow and fast at the same time. The adrenaline high is amazing.

Chuck doesn't seem to agree, but hey. Mike's driving pretty fast. Anyway, he's still managing to type and control three different screens while he freaks out, so he's got it under control.

Actually…

"So if your brain's a computer, can't you plug straight into Mutt?" Mike takes a corner at breakneck speed—Chuck makes a strangled noise, clinging to his seat. "So you don't have to type or anything."

"I-I—I'd have to have a neural jack, they never put in aaaaAAAHHH! MIKE!"

"Is that a thing though? They make those?"

"They're a theory!" It's a high-pitched squawk—Chuck's eyes are fixed on the road while his mouth is apparently on autopilot. "—they never made it work, it's—too dangerous—!" A sharp, panicky yell as Mike launches Mutt around a curve, almost horizontal. Mike, who has basically learned to tune out the screaming parts, just nods thoughtfully.

"That's cool though!"

Chuck makes a wordless noise that might be agreement or might be _oh god we're all going to die in fiery destruction_. Something like that.

" _They're in the stadium,_ " Dutch says, and a sonar pulse makes Mutt's chassis tremble as Dutch throws it out—four, five, six bots at least. " _Mike, there's always kids in there—_ "

"Chuck, I need a way in."

"Gimme a second!" There are ancient blueprints spread out wide across Chuck's screens, flickering as he scrolls past them. "Okay. Oh man, okay, Mike?"

That's the _I know what we have to do and I hate it_ tone of voice. Mike reflexively kicks Mutt up a gear, ready. "Hit me with it."

"Found you a weak spot, but you're gonna have to blast through." Chuck takes a steady breath and then goes on, talking fast, "—but if we aim too low we wrap around three-foot-thick concrete blocks and if we aim too high the stadium comes down on top of us—"

"I'll take it!" Mike spins the wheel. "You got that, guys?! Let's go!"

* * *

Everybody is still jittery and worked up when they get back to the hideout, covered in gravel and dust and more than a little bit singed. Halfway through the fight the Mama's Boys showed up, and after that everything went to hell. One of their bright pink hotrods slammed Mutt out of the way to rope a bot and almost rolled her—Mike shot out one of their tires, the roped bot got loose and latched on to Mutt's hood too close to shoot, and after that everything turned into kind of a blur.

After a raid like that, everybody needs to unwind again. Mike and Texas vanish to spar. Chuck vanishes into his room with a box of scraps and a welding kit, looking drained, Julie packs up to head back to Deluxe and Dutch grabs his tools and buries himself in his most recent modifications.

He's been working for what feels like a couple of minutes, but is probably more like hours, when somebody comes in.

Dutch is always ignoring people going in and out—he's right there by the cars, anybody who wants to get to the cars has to come past him—so he doesn't bother to say anything. Whiptail is tricky to modify because he worked so hard to keep her silhouette clean and smooth and adding something on risks messing that up and taking forever to fix, but Dutch relishes the challenge and once he's focused on his car it's going to take more than Mike tooling around in Mutt's engine block or Texas cleaning up Stronghorn's battered chassis.

And then somebody clears their throat, quiet and uncomfortable.

"…Dutch?"

Dutch jumps a little bit, pulls up his mask and turns around. Chuck is standing behind him, hunched in on himself nervously.

It almost feels like there should be something different about him now—some kind of sign, some way to tell. But he looks exactly like he did before anybody even suggested the word "cyborg". Nervous and skinny and all legs.

"What's up?"

"I just need somebody to look at—" Chuck stops, starts again. "…I've been…improving stuff." He shifts uncomfortably. "…y'know. The stuff I was…built with. So, I mean—nobody knew before so I've been doing it myself, but since you…" he waves a hand awkwardly. "…since you know now, I've kinda hit a wall and, uh…"

Dutch sits up a little straighter, pulls his mask off and sets it to one side. "Yeah," he says, "Okay."

"I'm not _bad_ at the physical part but it's not really my thing, I—I'm a programmer, not a mechanic—"

"Okay, yeah, totally." Dutch is already wiping off his hands, putting his stuff away quickly. "Sounds good."

"—I mean, if you're busy—"

"Are you workin' up to ask me if I want a look at your one-of-a-kind super-advanced experimental prosthetics or what?"

Chuck stops in mid-sentence, caught off-guard. "…uh…yes?"

"Oh, _sweet_." Dutch stands up and grins wide. "Absolutely. Yeah, I'd love to."

"Oh." Chuck stammers for a second and then smiles the same crooked smile he always does when somebody compliments him unexpectedly. "—okay! Cool. Uh…it's pretty messy, it's just a first prototype, not—"

"That's the best kind of work to look at though," Dutch says eagerly. "Seriously, I didn't wanna bother you to look at 'em but if you've got something you want me to look at…" he trails off hopefully.

Chuck is turning flattered, flustered pink. Dutch clears his throat and sits back.

"…if that's not weird," he says. "Just sounds really cool."

"Yeah, sure." Chuck settles down, dangling his legs into the empty space of the garage. "Uh…here."

Dutch comes over and sits down next to him, and Chuck winces, flexes his fingers and then turns his hand over and spreads his fingers.

The upgrade is a port about the size of a quarter, set smoothly in the skin of his palm. The reason for Chuck's wincing is pretty clear—the skin around the port is twisted and weirdly distorted. Under the thin skin of his wrist something is glowing blue-green, like luminescent veins.

"Whoa." Dutch takes Chuck's hand cautiously in both of his, flexing the wrist, staring at the port. "Is this…an energy cannon? You put an _energy cannon_ in your arm?"

"Well…I mean, it's way, way smaller."

"Whoa."

"I don't have to do the whole…" Chuck mimes the action of drawing back his slingshot. "—so if I have to use it it might not set off a bot's motion sensors and if I don't have room, y'know, or something…the recharge time isn't as good, and I haven't figured out how to make it less…creepy-looking? But it's going okay."

"You couldn't fire something like your bolts for your slingshot out of this though." Dutch pokes cautiously at the weirdly split skin. "Opening's way too small, you'd burn all the skin off your palms."

"That's the other thing I wanted you to look at." Chuck pulls his hand free, breathes in deep and flexes his fingers. A targeting screen pops up, sniper-scope precise, flashing calculations and adjustments. "…hubcap, over there by the wall."

Dutch squints. The hubcap doesn't look any bigger than a penny from where they sit, lying bent and discarded where it must have rolled away from the garage. "Seriously?"

Chuck's arm jerks. Eye-searing blue-green light flickers across the garage like a shooting star, and the hubcap flips into the air in a burst of neon light and clatters back down. Chuck hisses and scrubs his palm on his jeans.

"Couldn't do _that_ with the old version," he says, with more than a hint of smugness in his voice. "I mean, the other one would've blown it apart, but that's just if it could hit it, y'know?"

"Less powerful, more precise." Dutch turns Chuck's hand over in his, fascinated. "Like a sniper rifle instead of a laser cannon, huh? How's the range?"

"Uh…'bout the same. Little bit shorter?"

"Huh." Dutch taps the metal with a fingernail, fascinated. "Hey, did you _just_ install this? I never saw this before, dude."

"The slingshot needs a trigger." Chuck stares at his hand, concentrating; the port in his palm dissembles back under his skin, as seamless and invisible as his slingshot. "I'm trying to make it so this one just takes the command straight from my brain."

"Okay," says Dutch, who's still staring at the place where the port used to be. The cut has sealed shut again, leaving a slight welt of pink scarring in the pale skin of Chuck's palm. "—don't take this the wrong way, I know what they did sucks and everything? But that's _really cool,_ man. Wish I could customize myself."

Chuck blinks and then grins a little bit self-consciously and shrugs. "…yeah, there's…there's definitely a couple perks."

"So what you need's a way to compress more power through it and keep it from overheating," Dutch says, and frowns. "…how are you powering this stuff anyway?"

"Oh." Chuck leans back on one arm and presses a hand just below his breastbone. "Uh…y'know, just…super-experimental energy-conversion tech that could incinerate me any time. No big deal. Tanks my sugar if I don't eat and it needs a lot of calories, like, a _lot,_ but the conversion rate—"

"Hold up." Dutch looks up sharply. "You tellin' me _that's_ why you eat so much?"

"I ate a lot _before_ they did that surgery," Chuck says defensively. "You know how hard it is to get extra rations in Deluxe? This thing actually works way better on Motorcity food than Kane's stupid _throat cubes._ "

A shared shudder, one Deluxe kid to another. Deluxe tolerates the disgusting Kane Co. "food", but nobody _likes_ it.

"It's like when Mutt's weapons system got too good for our gunmetal," says Dutch, and leans back , looking up at the twinkling underside of Deluxe far overhead. "…we oughta still have some of the metal we used lying around, 's not like you'd need much. You gotta fix how it comes out though. That's nasty, man. Looks like it hurts too, there's gotta be a way to fix that."

Chuck doesn't comment on that. Just rubs his thumb slowly over the almost-invisible scar on his palm. Over and over again, back and forth.

"…you guys don't think this is…" Dutch watches him steadily—Chuck swallows and shakes his head. "…it's not weird, right?" His hand rubs absently up and down his arm, tracing the almost-invisible scars. "I mean—it's fine, if you think I'm—"

"Don't even start," Dutch says firmly. "Man, you're still the exact same person, you're still the same kinda Burner-class _weird_ you always were. You think a team with _Texas_ on it is gonna care you've got more implants than we do? Maybe we don't count as cyborgs, but…" he opens a hand—a purple data screen pops up, hovering over his fingertips. "Most of Motorcity's gotta have some kind of implant by now. Heck, down here _Texas_ is weirder than you, he's got the comm and that's it."

"Heh." Chuck smiles, startled. "Yeah, I guess—I guess so."

"Right?" Dutch claps him on the back. "Weird's normal in Motorcity, y'know? I mean…when we get Kane back for messin' with us, he gets an extra kick in the teeth for you, though. 'Cause—man, that's messed up. What happened to you. Sorry."

"Yeah." Chuck looks down and away—sniffs once and scrubs a hand hastily past his eyes. "…thanks, dude."

"No problem." Dutch pushes himself up and stretches. "…so I guess Nine Lives is giving Julie weird readings whenever she scans. You wanna go troubleshoot?"

"Oh—yeah, sure." Chuck stands too, twists and groans as his spine cracks. "…yeah. Mutt's making that grinding noise when we charge her boost again, I checked and it's not software conflict this time."

"I'll give her a look too." Dutch grabs his welding mask as they pass his worktable. "—you wanna go over your arm too when we're done? Should be interesting, I bet we can put some kinda shield in for your hand, protect you from the kickback."

"That would be _awesome_." Chuck's shoulders slump with relief. "The mechanical bit's not really my thing. I mean…I'm okay. I designed some of it, but some other guy did the nuts and bolts, hah. Oh! Oh, actually, we should get Jacob, too."

"Jacob?" Dutch sounds surprised—Jacob has his own projects, but usually he stays out of the way of the Burners and their work. "Why?"

"He, uh…he knew already. He's been my mechanic, down here."

"You got a mechanic already you should go to him," Dutch points out. "I don't wanna mess up your arms."

"Jacob doesn't know what to do with me either." Chuck waves it off. "And he's not as good with weapons as you are, come on." He hesitates, then clears his throat. "…I've got my blueprints. If that, uh…helps."

"I thought that was rude."

"I mean." Chuck opens and shuts his mouth once or twice, then manages, significantly red now, "—not if I'm _showing_ them to you, if you're—I—listen, do you want to see or not?"

* * *

Sparring Texas is always an experience. Mike is light on his feet and _really_ quick, but Texas is a tank and when he does land a hit it's brutal. By the time Mike manages to pin him down and finally get him to tap out, they're both soaked with sweat and more than a little bit bruised, and some of the constant flood of adrenaline has worn off. Mike pulls Texas up—pulls him in for a rough hug, suffers the friendly, bone-aching punch on the shoulder he gets in return, and then they go their separate ways to hunt down one of the hideout's rickety showers.

By the time Mike gets out of the shower again, the hideout is apparently empty. If Texas went driving, Stronghorn's probably gone—Mike throws his towel around his neck and wanders vaguely toward the garage to check who's home.

When he gets through the door, the first thing he sees is that Stronghorn is definitely gone. She's a big car, and the red underglow makes her pretty eye-catching. The second thing he sees is Jacob, Dutch and Chuck all bent around something on Dutch's worktable, muttering together. It's not exactly an unusual thing to see, but usually when all three of them are in the same place it's a car that they're gathered around and Chuck is either standing back and typing or sitting inside running diagnostics. Mike veers off from his intended course toward the garage and wanders toward the huddle at the work table instead.

For a second, what he sees doesn't register. Chuck's arm looks weird, kind of thin and wrong-colored, but Mike almost keeps walking until a sudden, sharp pulse of bright blue light flashes down Chuck's forearm and flares in his palm and Mike stops and looks closer and then stares.

Chuck's arm is opened up, neat and clinical, bloodless like a split seam from the center of his palm to the inside of his upper arm just under the shoulder. Under his skin, silver-white muscle fibers gleam soft yellow in the light of Dutch's worktable lamp. Chuck is poking at the weirdly reflective, pale silver tendons in his wrist with something that looks a lot like a scalpel, looking a little bit queasy but a _lot_ more at ease than Mike would be if somebody peeled the skin away from his arm.

ROTH chirps right by Mike's ear. Everybody jumps—ROTH, apparently not noticing, comes whirring over to hover by the table as well and drops a white roll with the Kane Co. "K" on the side next to the battered Motorcity tools on Dutch's table.

"Mike!" says Chuck, and abruptly pulls his arm close to his chest, hiding the stripped muscle and tendon. Mike is ludicrously reminded of the way he yelps and hides behind the shower curtain when Mike forgets to knock on the bathroom door, and for a second he almost laughs. "Hahaha—Mike, hi!"

"What…?" Mike gestures broadly at the table, the Deluxe tools laid out, and the three of them huddled around Chuck's arm.

"They're helping me, uh…upgrade something."

"He came up with it though," Dutch says, like this is really important to get right. He's got another Deluxe tool in his hand, turning something small and silver-white over between his fingers. "I can't take credit for this stuff, man, it's pretty sweet."

Okay. _Totally_ normal, not weird at all. Mike steps a little bit closer, curious despite the lurch in his stomach at the sight of the open skin and exposed muscle. "…can I see?"

Chuck looks surprised, then confused, then something like embarrassed, and then he sheepishly unfolds from around his arm and lays it back out on the table.

The split in his skin is clean and neat, faintly pink around the edges but bloodless. Mike stares unabashedly for a few seconds, then glances up and sees Chuck looking at him with that strange, tense set to his shoulders. Waiting. For what, some kind of…judgment? For Mike to call him a freak and walk away?

"…doesn't that hurt?" he says instead. "Why isn't it bleeding?"

"The skin around the incisions…" Chuck hesitates, chews his lip and then tries, "…okay, imagine there's, like…tiny little…"

"It squeezes off the blood vessels when he keys in a maintenance session," says Jacob shortly. "They set it up to turn off sensation from that skin and all the muscles when he's got it open, too, which is more than I'd figure Abraham was willing to do."

"Try fitting this in," says Dutch, and puts down the thing he's been turning over in his hands. "Right there."

It's a tiny plate of white metal, slightly cupped. Chuck takes it carefully, turns it over and slides it onto his palm, fitting it neatly onto the pad of his thumb. He bends his thumb, touches the tip of each finger to it in quick succession; the plate flexes a little with the movement.

"That oughta do the same thing your slingshot does, dissemble and set itself up on the surface again," Dutch says. Chuck taps a finger against the metal; it looks like nothing but a flat plate, but a screen pops up. "Synched?"

"Hooked in," Chuck mumbles, and types something with his working hand. "…synched."

"Tech up there has changed so much since I was puttin' bots together," Jacob says, and picks up one of the Deluxe tools from the roll ROTH brought over. "—thanks, Roth."

ROTH beeps and salutes, then reaches out to poke cautiously at Chuck's arm. Chuck jumps, then cautiously offers his hand—he shivers all over when one of ROTH's "hands" touches the artificial muscle.

"So—wait." Mike still can't quite manage to take his eyes off the way the skin peels back from the muscle. "What are you doing, though?"

"Adding another weapon system," says Chuck. "That's the slingshot." He slides a finger between artificial muscles carefully, exposing slivers of darker metal striped with circuitry. Mike swallows. "And…here's the conduit for the new upgrade." A thin silver channel, covered in barely-visible lines of neon blue light. It runs through the band of artificial tendon on Chuck's wrist and sits in his palm in the center of the silver-white plates Jacob is now carefully attaching with what looks like a tiny soldering iron. "Okay. It's hooked up and it's not sending up any flags in the system, so I guess…let's give it a shot."

When he pulls the halves of the skin together again they close like they were never separated, leaving nothing but a pale, hairline scar. Dutch whistles, low and impressed. Jacob looks slightly pained, but doesn't comment as Chuck bends his arm and his wrist carefully, then wiggles all his fingers.

"…makes my hand feel kinda heavy," he says, and spreads his fingers wide to poke at his palm. "…looks okay, though. Okay. Target?"

"Hit Kane." Dutch points—one of Texas's punching bags is standing abandoned in the corner, with a slightly ragged picture of Kane taped to it at head height. "Right in the nose."

The metal plates form in the same slightly creepy way the slingshot does, pieces assembling themselves, snapping into place on his skin. Chuck breathes in once, slow and deep, sights down his arm, and then fires.

The paper with Kane's face on it flutters high in the air and then drifts down, burned through. Chuck breathes out and turns his hand over; the palm is still lined silver. The port in the middle glows and then fades.

"Wow," he says, and grins. "It worked!"

"It worked!" Dutch throws an arm around his shoulder jubilantly, victorious. "Awesome! Try puttin' it back."

Chuck's fingers twitch. The port and the shield around it vanish again smoothly, leaving nothing but faint, pink seams where they were.

"Whoa," says Mike. Chuck glances back at him, grinning.

"Pretty cool?" He sounds kind of nervous, like he's still worried he's going to scare Mike off. Mike wraps his arm over Chuck's shoulders too, squeezing him tight instead. His hand rests on Dutch's shoulder—Dutch glances up at him and grins.

" _Awesome_."

Chuck _lights up_ and it's so worth it. "Yeah?"

"Totally." Mike pokes at the palm with the port in it—there's no trace of the metal, just that almost invisible scar. "Wow."

A thundering _roar_ cuts off whatever Chuck was about to say—Stronghorn comes roaring back into the garage, flickers and goes dark as Texas turns her off and pops her open. To Mike's surprise when the top of the car flips neatly open, Texas isn't the only person climbing out. Julie slides down Stronghorn's hood and lands lightly on her feet. Texas vaults out too, shoves his hands in his pockets and wanders around the car to say something to her, too quiet to hear.

"Hey!"

They both look up as Dutch strolls over to the edge of the ledge overlooking the garage. "Yeah?" Julie calls back.

"Where were you guys?"

"Driving!" Texas crosses his arms, striding over to glare up at them . "What's it look like we were doin'?" and then, before anybody can actually answer, "—what are you doin' up there?"

"Trying things out," says Dutch cagily, and grins back at Chuck as Jacob, Mike and Chuck wander over to look down into the garage. "Thanks again, by the way."

"Yeah," says Chuck, "no problem."

"Trying what out?" Texas squints at them. "…hey. Were you—?"

"Whatever you're gonna say," says Jacob firmly, "—I'm gonna go ahead and say no."

"I was just poking around in my arm," says Chuck, and elbows Dutch. "Quit making it sound weird!"

"I didn't!" Dutch doesn't bother to pretend he's not laughing. "I didn't say anything!"

Everybody drops down, one at a time, and the organized chaos of a comfortable Burner argument wells up as they all come inside and settle into the lounge, spreading out to start up video games or cards or to read. Jacob ducks around the counter and starts stirring something on the stove that smells weirdly earthy and looks kind of like a pot full of mud, listening to his kids argue with an expression of profound contentment on his face.

"I'm surprised you're still here," Julie says to Chuck, during a brief lull in the conversation as Dutch fiddles with a loose plate on ROTH's side and Texas jogs to the kitchen to bother Jacob for food.

"What?" Chuck, who's been staring at his hand and flexing his fingers carefully, glances up, distracted. "Why?"

"It's four."

"So?"

"…so…it's a Friday night?"

Chuck's mouth drops open. "It's _what?!_ "

"What?" Mike sits up, startled by the sudden volume of Chuck's voice. "—what's up?"

"It's Friday!" Chuck is scrambling upright—he has to shove Mike's legs off his lap to get upright, and Mike stands up too, disgruntled and still confused. " _Mike,_ come on! Friday nights, remember? I was supposed to be on the battlefield fifteen minutes ago!"

"I'll pass tonight," Julie says, as Chuck digs around and yanks his shoes out from under the couch, fumbling them in his hurry. "Hey Dutch, Texas! Do you guys wanna go RPing with Chuck?"

"TEXAS NEEDS HIS CALORIES!" Texas's voice echoes out of the kitchen. Dutch waves a hand vaguely, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, frowning at ROTH's plating.

"I'll go!" Mike pushes himself up. "Come on, bud. Let's go save a kingdom."


	2. II: Initiate Repair Cycle

((This chapter is where it gets somewhat bloody, but if it helps at all it also features somebody loud and gaudy and too fond of the sound of his own voice getting punched in the face)) ((finally))

* * *

LARPing is still mostly incomprehensible to Mike. He was raised by Kane Co. and Kane Co. doesn't believe in games, doesn't think make-believe is _a valuable use of time_. But it's nice to watch, and try to understand. It's not a game, for these guys. Watching them take it so seriously is baffling and gratifying at the same time.

It's not rare for Mike to be the only one to go—the other Burners enjoy it too, but they're busy and it's kind of unfair, having all of them there to help out at the same time. Mike enjoys it a lot more than he would've believed he was going to, back when he first heard of it—it's really nice to get a chance to hang out that doesn't involve getting shot at. Strategy was never his strong point even as a cadet, but he still remembers enough to point out possible traps or suggest a couple of tricks of his own.

Today, they didn't really need his help. Mike mostly sat out on the sidelines, watching with the weird mixture of confusion and amused fondness that always seems to come back when he's watching the group of dusty boys and girls fight their way back and forth across the field, yelling and cheering and dramatically dying in histrionic throes of agony.

Right now, they seem to be having trouble. Chuck is constantly under attack—anybody gunning for the crown has to go through him first—but unlike when they're under attack in Mutt, he doesn't look scared or overwhelmed. Just determined. His team is getting pressed back, but as Mike watches he raises his lance and yells something, indistinct over the noise—his ragtag "army" cheers and rallies for another charge.

And then, across the battlefield, somebody screams.

There are people yelling and shouting all over the place, but it's a completely different sound, pure and sharp and terrified. Chuck drops his lance and pulls his slingshot before it's done echoing, staring around, wide-eyed and looking for the danger, game forgotten. Mike dropped off his perch and started running before his brain even had time to register what he heard, sprinting towards the edge of the field where kids in shabby homemade armor are screaming, scattering in front of a hulking, many-legged shape.

One of Kane's Hounds stalks onto the beaten dirt, scanning the fleeing LARPers with its single glowing eye. Mike loses precious seconds reaching for a jacket pocket that's not there, growls and yanks his staff off his belt. The Hound is damaged—it's leaking oil and sparking, snapping its fangs at the running kids—but it's still deadly, still capable of doing damage (so much damage, _too_ much damage). As Mike starts forward it catches a girl's cloak and pulls her off her feet. Mike's almost there but it's opening its jaws and it's too far away—

"Mike!"

It's pure instinct; Mike throws himself to one side and feels the sizzling heat of a plasma bolt going right past where his right ear would have been. Chuck's first shot ricochets off the armor on the Hound's shoulder, but the second one hits right in its glowing eye socket and the glass shatters in a spitting shower of sparks. It rears up on its back legs, pawing at its face and howling, then slips in the loose dirt and slams down onto its side in a billowing cloud of dust. Chuck sprints forward past him to grab the kid it was looming over, pulling her onto her feet and pushing her ahead of him away from the Hound's body. His slingshot snags on his cape as he starts to run after her—he stops, growling curses, then yanks the cloak off and drops it, kicking away as it tangles around his legs.

"Lord Vanquisher!" It's Ruby, running in the _opposite_ direction she should be running and Chuck's mouth drops open as he catches sight of her. "I'm coming, hold on—!"

"Get out of here!" Chuck yells, cracked with terror, and Mike looks away from Ruby and feels his heart stop in his chest. Behind Chuck, the Hound is getting up again, head turning blindly as he shouts. "—run, are you nuts?! Run!"

"Chuck!"

It all seems to happen too quickly and too unbearably slow both at the same time. Chuck's eyes snap to Mike as Mike runs toward him, he sees where Mike is looking, pointing, he realizes what's going on, written clear in the sudden shock on his face.

He has just enough time to turn, one hand rising in pointless defense, before the Hound lunges and those huge metal jaws close on his arm like a bear trap. The Hound shakes him like a rag doll, twists its head sharply and Chuck spins through the air and slams brutally into the ground. He rolls to a stop and lies still, not getting up again.

The Hound turns to Mike, blind eye weeping black oil, and drops a limp, pale arm to the dirt.

There's a moment of dead, gasping silence, and then somebody screams again, high and cracking, and Mike and the Hound both lunge forward at the same moment. Mike scores a jagged gash across one flank, but the armor is inches thick and he barely manages to avoid jaws that snap wildly at his stomach. The thing's head turns blindly, following the sound of his staff's blades, and Mike half-severs one of its remaining legs, throws himself forward into a roll and then lurches to a dead stop as the Hound's jaws close on his staff and wrench it out of his hand.

If the Hound could still see its next bite might've taken off Mike's head. Instead its neck slams clumsily into his side as it turns on sparking legs, throwing him to one side with a breathless huff. He needs Mutt—he can't get to her in time, can't leave this thing to go after the kids, to go after Chuck—he needs his staff—

It's lying in the dust on his right, just barely out of arm's reach. Mike starts to scramble up and then throws himself back again as a clawed foot swipes past him, barely missing his chest. The Hound turns its head blindly, searching for him, then snaps again—close enough to Mike's face as he rolls out of the way he can feel the breeze against his face. There's a crumbled wall at his back, and there has to be a way past this thing, there has to be a way to get his staff back, he's just gotta _figure it out_ and now would be a _really_ good time—

And then a bright blue-green bolt of plasma hits the Hound right underneath the angle of its jaw, between armored plates, deep inside the mess of metal tendons and wires in its throat. The explosion half-severs the thing's thick neck and slams Mike back with the force of it, splattering the dirt around him and the front of his shirt with a spray of oil. The Hound howls, jerking and seizing. There's no time for shock—Mike grits his teeth and throws himself sideways with all his strength, snatches up his staff in mid-roll and jams the spitting blades deep into the sparking gap blown in the Hound's throat.

Its head hits the ground with dead finality. The body jitters for a minute, sparking, and then slumps to the ground and goes still. A ragged cheer rises from the LARPers , but Mike is already shoving past the Hound's body, past the gouges it left in the ground, dropping down next to Chuck as his arm trembles and drops back into the dust. The neon glow in the palm of his hand dies away as Mike watches, vanishing below the skin.

"Got him," says Chuck, with an exhausted kind of satisfaction, and then falls back on the ground, staring up at the distant ceiling of Motorcity. His eyes are wide, his voice is high and tight. "—ha. Haha. Mike, my arm—"

"You're gonna be fine."

"Heh—d-doesn't even hurt." Chuck's face is very, very pale, sweat-streaked—his eyes stand out vividly blue around pinprick pupils. His voice is strained and choked but weirdly matter-of-fact. "—yet. 102 over 65—my blood pressure's dropping. Mike, I'm going into shock." He half-glances toward his arm, curled in toward his chest—blood is soaking his chest and stomach, his ripped sleeve, the dust under him. He looks away again and squeezes his eyes shut again. " _—not good_ shit _that's not good—_ "

"Oh god," somebody is whimpering. " _Ohgodohgod—_ "

"Okay," says Mike, and looks at the dust, the Hound's corpse, anything but the blood on Chuck's shirt, the awful way his arm just _ends_ above the elbow. "Okay."

"You…" Chuck takes three fast, sharp breaths, holds the air and lets it out like he's barely staying calm. Closes his eyes. "You gotta stop the bleeding, I c—I calculate—stats say six and a half minutes until unconsciousness. Fifteen until potential brain damage, estimated loss—loss per minute—" His chest and stomach are dark, slick scarlet, the stump of his arm is a mess of metal filaments, twisted wire and sickeningly organic torn flesh. Behind Mike, one of the LARPers retches.

"Bandages," says Mike, and it comes out Kane-Co.-Commander sharp. "Cloth, belts, whatever you've got. Jacob!" Nothing. "Shoot—Dutch!"

The comm flickers on. "Mike?" Dutch's signal is weak, jittering in and out across the expanse of Motorcity. "What's up?"

"Chuck's hurt. Bad."

The indrawn breath is audible through the static. The faint sound of hurried footsteps. "What do I do?"

"Get the spare room set up. Call a doctor. We'll be there in a few."

"Keep me posted," says Dutch, and flickers out.

"Five minutes," says Chuck distantly. His good hand gropes absently at the wound, dragging at ripped flesh and torn metal. "Heartrate 160. 176. And—and 82, 84, 81 over 44. Mike it—hurts. It _hurts_ —"

"I know." Mike snatches a handful of someone's offered cloak, tears the fabric and presses a wad of cloth to the bleeding flesh. Chuck lets out a stuttered, broken noise, a gasp on the back of a sharp moan. His breath is coming faster, panicky as the pain sets in.

"Ruby, I need Mutt." Mike tosses her the keys with a bloody hand. "You only need first gear, don't let her stall. Who here is fastest?" A few pointed fingers and raised hands. "You—yeah you, with the mustache, go to the throne room, get me the box under the—"

"We're not supposed to help—he's a _Raymanthian_ ," says the guy he pointed to. He's staring at the place where the Hound dropped Chuck's arm, looking utterly shell-shocked.

"He's _bleeding!_ " It comes out a harsh snarl. The boy flinches at the sharpness of the sound. "This is bigger than your _game_! Get me the box under the throne or as soon as Chuck is safe I swear I'm gonna come straight back here and kick your—"

"Ryan, _go_!" the queen of the other side is very, very pale. "Are you crazy?! Run!"

" _Fuck,_ " gasps Chuck sharply, and his hand closes so hard on Mike's arm it feels like bruises are already setting in. Mike bites his lip and presses the cloth even harder against the wound, feeling hot blood ooze against his fingertips through the cloth, feeling Chuck flinch and shudder at the pressure. " _Oh god_ ow _god—_ "

 _"Shhh…_ "

" _Hurtsithurts it really hurts_ Mike—"

"I know, hold on—"

The boy from the other group comes sprinting back, panting, drops to his knees and clicks open the first-aid box, ashen-faced.

"Somebody get me two of the red needles," Mike grits out, and winces as Chucks' fingers dig into his arm again, painfully tight. One of the girls from Chuck's team pushes the Bardonian out of the way, pulls her hair up in a ponytail and starts assembling the injector gun with deft fingers. " _Chuck_. Talk to me, buddy."

"I…" says Chuck, and blinks. " _I…c—I can't—I don't—_ "

"Put his head down," says the girl, and pulls a red-banded needle out of the rows of pre-filled injections. The icon of a woman Mike's never seen hovers next to her, talking urgent and quiet in her ear as she works. "Lift his feet up. Four shots? Mom, is that okay?"

"If it's Quevex, you can go up to six," says the woman's icon. "—but that's a lot, four is safer—"

"Four then," says Mike grimly, lowering Chuck back to the ground—there's blood and dirt smeared on his face, his breathing is awful and fast and shallow and he reaches out after Mike with his good arm but doesn't have the strength to reach him. "Give me the—"

"I know how," says the girl. "Hold him."

Chuck twitches as the needle goes into his arm, but he's already shaking so hard it doesn't make too much of a difference. In the distance, Mutt's engine roars and barks, and Mike holds out a bloody hand to the girl with the first-aid kit.

"Gimme something clean."

The bundle she pushes into his hands is gauze and cotton mostly, but even though when Mike pulls the wad of cloth he's been using away it's completely soaked, the bloodflow seems a little slower. He pushes the new cloth hard against the open flesh, tears another chunk off the cape with his teeth and wraps it around.

"Bandages." Mike's hands move on autopilot, holding the cloth, grabbing the bandages. "Field dressing will do for now, but we need a medical team." Everything is too distant and sharp and fast. Too bright. White and blue.

"Medical…?"

" _No team,_ " Chuck croaks, and gasps again as Mike pulls the bandages tight around the cloak, wrapping it tight. "Nnh! N—not down—here. _Motorcity, Mikey, n-not Deluxe—_ "

"I know." He does, he does know, but the words keep bubbling up at the back of his mind. _Chilton to base, we have a man down we need backup send a medical team—_ the blood hasn't soaked through the new dressing yet, but at the rate he was bleeding it's only a matter of time.

There's a sharp screech of brakes and people scatter as Mutt slides to a stop and Ruby tumbles out of the driver's-side door, looking ashen.

"You have to keep his head down and his feet up," says the girl who helped with the shots urgently, "—my mom's a doctor, she says you have to keep blood going to his heart and his brain."

" _Get—_ " Chuck lift his head a little, looks at the remains of his arm for a split second and then drops his head back down, papery white, squeezing his eyes shut. "—g-get my arm, we can—I can fix…"

Oh god, okay. "Okay," says Mike, and scrambles up, staring around. "You, you, get him in the back seat. Ruby, start her back up again."

Chuck's arm is barely bleeding when Mike cautiously reaches out and puts a hand on the bony wrist—it feels more foreign than it ever has, and at the same time sickeningly _the_ _same,_ so familiar _._ The skin is weirdly cool, like it's been in ice, and the wires and metal muscles are almost clean. The severed skin bleeds sluggishly, but barely enough to puddle in the dirt.

Mike picks it up gingerly and hurries back over. It seems awful to carry it with him, worse to put it in the passenger's seat—the thought makes a hysterical kind of laugh bubble up in his chest. He leans in past the two brawny boys who'd carried Chuck to the car, and puts the severed arm gently on his chest. Chuck shudders a little, but he's breathing slower now, blinking slow, good arm hanging limp.

"… _eighteen…minutes…_ " he says, bleary and sluggish, and the blue of his eyes seems to flicker in Mutt's dim back seat. " _…power…save—I'm gonna just…sleep a little…_ "

His eyes go dark. His head falls back, his shaking stops. Mike stares at his still form for a single frozen second, and then Chuck's chest rises and falls and he shakes himself awake and runs, swinging into the driver's seat.

"I'll call you guys!" he yells out the window, and then he's driving, faster than he ever has and still too slow.

* * *

By the time Mike pulls in at the hideout in a screech of brakes, the rest of the Burners are rushing out to meet him. Mike managed to fill them in on some of the situation on the way back, in fragments, but when Texas pulls open the door and reaches in for Chuck he does a double-take at the sight of the blood and the disembodied arm laid across Chuck's chest.

"Oh, _shit,_ " says Julie, and covers her mouth with one hand—she looks ill. "Oh god. Uh…Texas, help me."

Mike jumps out of the driver's side door and together the three of them manage to get Chuck out of the back seat without any jolts or bumps. He shifts a little bit when he's lifted, groans, and then goes still again. His face is very pale, ashy grey.

"Jacob called a doctor," says Dutch—he looks really pale, but he reaches out and grabs the severed arm as it threatens to fall off of Chuck's chest. He holds it out as far from him as possible as ROTH reaches out, whirring anxiously, and pats Chuck's lifeless face. "Buddy, leave him alone for a sec, okay? He's hurt."

ROTH beeps and pats one last time, then takes off ahead of them and holds open the door as they carry Chuck inside.

"Jacob?" Mike calls as they come in—"Kitchen table!" Jacob yells back. When they get inside, he's got a kettle of boiling water out and he's wiping down the table, wearing his big rubber gloves and looking grim. When he looks up and sees Mike, pale and covered in blood, he takes a deep breath and strips off his gloves.

"Put him down," he says. "Robbie, they got him here."

"Okay." Another unfamiliar icon flashes up next to him; a woman with short white hair. "How does he look?"

Mike ends up talking to the doctor. The others run around grabbing things as the doctor talks—Jacob's first aid kit at the base is a lot bigger and better-stocked than the emergency kit under Mutt's seat or the thrown-together box of odds and ends the LARPing group keeps under the throne. "Anybody know how to put an IV in?" Jacob is pulling out handfuls of little sterile sealed packages. "They gave us these, didn't hardly explain how they worked—"

"I can explain it but unless you give me coordinates I can't get there," says the doctor dryly.

"I think—I think I know how?" Mike didn't pay a lot of attention during field dressings and emergency medical treatment, but the woman with the white gloves had looked around the room, pointed straight at him with a needle in her hands and said " _I hope you're not the type to pass out on me, big guy_ ". Said he had great veins and anybody would be lucky to have to stick him.

Chuck's veins, on the other hand, are faint and hard to feel, blue under his pale skin but impossible to get a needle into. It's Dutch who gets the IV in, in the end, leaning in really close and squinting at his own hands like he's afraid they're going to do something wrong if he doesn't watch them carefully enough. The doctor pulls up another little icon; her nurse husband talks them through messy dressings and tape and tubes and she asks questions about blood loss and height and weight and then has Dutch count drops in the little plastic tube.

"I know you keep your hideout secret, Jacob," she says before she signs off. "—but if he starts to run a fever or it isn't healing, bring him over here. I'm invested now."

She flickers out. Jacob sighs and waves a hand ambivalently at where her icon used to be, then reaches into the box the IV kit came out of, rummaging around again.

"Okay," he says. "Now for the fun part."

"He said he could fix it," says Mike. His hands and arms feel sticky and stiff, covered in blood. His shirt is gonna be ruined. He rubs his hands slowly together and feels blood crack and peel away from his palms. "He said we could put it back together."

"Yeah, and I'm the closest thing he has to a technician," Jacob says, and pulls out a shiny, deluxe-white box from his battered medical kit. "—best he's got. We gotta get it back on there, we can't wait for him to wake up and do it himself."

"What do we do?" Dutch looks very grim, eyes turned firmly away from the bloody mess of Mike and Chuck's shirts and hands. Jacob pulls out something what looks like the white, streamlined Kane Co. version of the injector Mike used back on the battlefield.

"Hold him still."

"What?" Mike's voice cracks a little—Chuck stirs, but doesn't open his eyes. "Why?"

"Because this is gonna hurt," says Jacob grimly. "I got no time to futz around in his programming and try to turn off this arm to work on, and we can only make the flesh and blood part numb."

"But—can't we—"

"If we don't get this arm hooked back up soon he's gonna _lose the arm,_ " Jacob growls, and leans all the weight in his wiry body on the bicep of the mutilated arm, manhandling the severed ends as close as they'll go with the bandage in the way. " _Hold him still._ I'll try to do everything I can before he wakes up, but we got no time to argue about this!"

Mike glances down at Chuck's ashen face, and then leans forward across his bloody chest to pin both of his arms, breathing shallow at the smell of drying blood. Dutch hesitates and then follows suit, leaning his weight across Chuck's legs, eyes squeezed shut.

Blood starts flowing again as soon as Jacob pulls Mike's makeshift dressing away from the wound, but it's sluggish compared to how it was before the drive back to the hideout. Jacob huffs out a breath, cracks his bony knuckles, and buries his fingers in weird, slick bio-polymers, shifting around artificial muscle, exposing a jagged end of silver-white, metallic bone. He lines up the ends of the bones, squints at the join and then reaches down and drags the tip of the Deluxe tool over the seam.

There's a small but searingly bright flare of white light and the two ends of the bone reform together, leaving the bizarre, gut-wrenching sight of mutilated skin and twisted metal around spotless, shining bone. Chuck still seems to be unconscious, but Mike is leaning on his chest and he feels the sudden sharp kick of his heartbeat. The trembling is coming back.

"He's waking up," Mike says through gritted teeth, but if Jacob hears him he doesn't bother to answer. He's fitting together a ripped muscle with painstaking care, tugging it taut and then running the tiny, glowing tooltip over the join, melding the edges back together. As Mike watches, the freshly-mended muscle twitches and bunches, flexing—a couple of fingers twitch jerkily on Chuck's pale, cold hand.

" _Ahh,_ " says Chuck, small and shaky and confused, like he can't understand what he's feeling—his face twists abruptly with pain as Jacob takes another two broken connections and pulls them together. "Ah! Ow—oh—"

" _It's okay,_ " Mike mumbles, even though it's 100% _not_ okay, and Chuck twitches and shudders, trying to throw off Mike's grip on his shoulders. His hand flexes and twitches as Jacob puts another searing white line through the broken muscle, piecing it back together. " _Just a couple more._ "

" _No nonononono_ ," Chuck gasps, and Mike has to lean hard on him as he gives a sudden, sharp jerk, tries to throw off the hands holding him down. His eyes are barely open—they're unfocused, distant, uncomprehending. " _Hurts stop it hurts—_ "

"Hold him _still_ ," Jacob grunts, and Dutch grunts as Jacob pulls another muscle together and a shuddering spasm of pain tightens Chuck's whole body like a bowstring. Mike drops his head and closes his eyes so he doesn't have to look when the dark wetness in his best friend's eyes overflows down his cheeks, but he can't cover his ears and the terrified, agonized sob by his ear is crystal-clear. "Couple more, just a couple more." Blood is starting to flow again now, slicking Jacob's fingers and making it harder to keep his grip on the metal. He growls and seals another tear. "—last muscle—" a cracked wail, and Chuck's forehead almost smashes into Mike's temple as he jerks, trying to thrash away. "—I know, kid, I know—two nerve clusters, he ain't gonna like this, _hold him_ —"

Jacob's fast, fast enough to fix both in the endless space of one long, broken scream, but the noise still seems to go on forever, unbearable and inescapable and awful. A flashing white pulse runs up and down the exposed metal muscles and the gleaming nerve fibers, and Chuck's scream of pain breaks off abruptly as he chokes on air and gasps out a mess of fragmented babble. " _—subroutine restored connection—functional restored circuit reboot f-f-functional assess—assessment 73% functional c-capacity—_ "

"Let him go," Jacob orders, and Dutch and Mike both jerk away, hands raised, stepping back to watch as Chuck takes great, sobbing breaths and curls up around his bleeding arm, shaking violently all over. Jacob looks around, reaches out and grabs Mike with bloody hands. "—c'mere," he says firmly, and shoves Mike down by the nape of his neck, wrapping an arm awkwardly around Chuck's shivering shoulders. Mike is just about to straighten up and ask what the heck is going on when Chuck takes a shuddering breath in, reaches out and yanks Mike closer with his good arm, squeezing him tight, burying his paper-white, sweat -streaked face in Mike's neck.

And then he starts sobbing. Great, hoarse, racking jags of sound that shake his entire body, hoarse whimpers as he struggles with every inhale. His tears are hot and fresh on the collar of Mike's blood-soaked shirt and against his cheek and the angle of his jaw. "Shoot," says Mike, and then "—uh—" and then "…I know, I know, sorry bro—sorry, _shhhh_ …" There's blood seeping through his shirt again where Chuck's bad arm is pinned between them, but Chuck either doesn't notice or doesn't care that he's smearing blood on everything again.

Mike has seen this before—in the kids who were new to Kane Co.'s dog-eat-dog training program, in the newbie scientists who came out of Kane's office limping and winded and bruised. Numb while you're still scared, running on adrenaline, dodging training bots and putting field dressings on whatever bleeds, rolling with the punches as best you can and trying not to get hurt. Then when the danger's gone they fold and all the pain, all the fear, it all comes back at the same time.

Nobody in basic training ever got an arm torn off and then repaired without anesthetic, though. And it was never somebody Mike knew, never somebody he cared about, never somebody he was _responsible for protecting—_

"… _Mike._ "

It's the first clear word he's said since he passed out. Chuck shifts, turns his face into the shoulder of Mike's shirt and breathes in.

" _Mike,_ " he says again, still bleary, half-sobbing. " _Ow._ "

"I know, buddy." _You didn't protect him_ , _you let this happen_ —it's like a physical pain in his chest. "You did good."

"Just the easy part now," says Jacob, somewhere far away and not important. "Two shots and then we can get this closed up. Won't hurt a bit."

Chuck makes an uneasy noise, buried in Mike's shoulder, but Jacob is already pulling his injured arm free. There's the familiar _crack-hiss_ of an injector and Chuck flinches but doesn't fight as the anesthetic goes in. He's starting to calm down again—or he's just too tired and low on blood to fight any more. Mike shifts his hold and gets an arm under him, pulling him closer, letting him hide his face as Jacob pulls more tools out of his box and pokes at the torn skin.

"…we got three of those skin-strip doo-dads from Deluxe," he says. "…We got staples but we got no way to put them in. We had glue but _somebody…_ " he glares at Texas, "…left the cap off and then the hospital got hit a couple weeks ago and people are still healin' up from G-day, they needed all the stuff they could get. So I ain't restocked, that stuff's out—"

"I could go to Deluxe and see if I can get some of that new bio…bond…? Whatever it's called?"

" _No time,_ " Chuck says, very very quietly. " _No time, still—bleeding—_ "

"Chuck says he's bleeding too fast," says Mike, and Jacob nods. "Okay, so—so what are the options we _do_ have, then?"

"I can use the strips we got, that'll close it up part of the way," says Jacob, and pulls out a handful of stolen Deluxian vacuum-sealed packages. "And then we put the pressure on and hope we get circulation while Julie runs upstairs to knock on doors. Or…" he grimaces. "…I can sew him up. Might not be pretty, but it worked for decades before we got all this fancy Kane Co. tech."

Chuck mumbles something again—his eyes are closed, his face is ashen. Mike leans in—he's just talking, apparently more to himself than to any of the Burners, a constant low stream of fragmented babble. _Calculate the probability of—_ Mike manages to make out, and _time that's passed_ and _protocol_ and _tissue damage_.

"…Chuck?"

" _Stitches_ ," says Chuck.

"You sure?"

He doesn't answer, just lies still and breathes in and out heavy and slow, like saying the word took most of his remaining strength.

"…stitches it is," says Jacob firmly, and pulls out a curved needle in another vacuum-sealed package. "We can clean it up later, right now we just gotta save the arm." He pushes at the torn skin where the shots went in, gentle at first and then harder, testing—Chuck doesn't wince. "You feel my hand right now?"

Chuck takes a long, slow, shaky breath and shakes his head.

"He's good." Mike squeezes him a little—Chuck quirks the corner of his mouth up very faintly and then immediately goes still again, breathing ragged and slow.

"I'm no surgeon," Jacob mumbles, and behind Mike scissors snip as he threads a needle. Jacob doesn't seem to really be talking to any of them—the stream of commentary seems to help him, so Mike doesn't comment. "—I mean, I sew. Ain't quite the same thing though, so if there's a scar…"

He keeps talking, but Mike isn't really listening. Julie has come to stand next to him, reaching out a hand, and for a second he almost pulls Chuck away from her, he's still so keyed-up and defensive. But it's just Julie, and she looks pale and worried, and everybody here wants to help. Mike forces himself to relax, and Julie reaches out and lays a hand carefully on Chuck's hair, petting it slowly. Chuck jumps at the touch, and then relaxes again. His breathing eases out a little.

For a while, that's how it goes. Jacob grumbles and mutters to himself, orders Dutch and Texas to get him things, and painstakingly sews for what feels like hours. Julie runs her fingers through bloody blonde hair gently, and Chuck takes ragged breaths, face buried in Mike's shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut.

"Okay," Jacob says finally. "…done."

The seam is a slightly ragged line of tight black stitches, all around Chuck's arm. Jacob smears some of their precious Deluxe anti-infective on it, wraps it up carefully in gauze, and when he lays Chuck's arm down it looks almost normal again. He leans forward on the table, bowing his head, and lets out a long, slow breath, and then straightens up and comes around Mike to get a look at Chuck's face.

"Hey," he says, and Mike squeezes Chuck a little—he groans. "You awake?"

Chuck nods blearily.

"Well you shouldn't be," says Jacob firmly. "You gotta heal. You can sleep or I can put you in a repair cycle, what'll it be, kid?"

"Repair cycle," Chuck says immediately. His voice is very small, hoarse and rough.

"Yup. How long?"

"Uh…" Chuck looks exhausted—he raises his good arm and scrubs at his tear-soaked face blearily, obviously struggling to think. "…two—three days."

"You got it." Jacob turns to Mike. "You're up."

"Um—okay." Mike clears his throat, feeling vaguely sheepish as the rest of the Burners turn to look at him expectantly. "What do I say?"

"You know the first part."

He does, as much as he hates it. Mike breathes in. "…command."

Chuck twitches, just barely. Mike glances at Jacob.

"…initiate repair cycle."

"Initiate repair cycle."

"72-hour duration."

"72-hour duration."

"Confirm priority command," Chuck says wearily—he already sounds half-gone. "—72-hour repair cycle."

"Uh…"

"It's what he asked for," Jacob nudges Mike promptingly. "G'wan."

"C-confirm."

All the tension abruptly goes out of Chuck's body. His eyes don't fall shut, they just… _turn off,_ unfocusing and going dim, slivers of bloodshot white and pale blue. Mike lowers him carefully back onto the table—he doesn't react to the movement, just lies there motionless.

"Well, the confirmation protocol works," Jacob grumbles, and reaches out to close Chuck's eyes carefully. "—there. Now, we got a mess to clean up."

"Whoa," says Texas, and strides past Mike to poke Chuck's good shoulder. Chuck doesn't move. His chest rises and falls once, very slowly, but other than that and the slow pound of his pulse in his neck, he's still. "Hey! Tiny, what'd you do?"

"Uh…" Mike looks to Jacob. Jacob, who's gathering up the first aid kit again, sighs.

"He's shut down," he says, and smacks Texas's hand away as he goes to poke Chuck's still face. "Quit that. 'S like bein' asleep, but he won't wake back up until the time runs out or Mike tells him to. Lets him heal. No pain, no nothin'."

"But…if somebody gets in here while he's like this…" Julie sounds uneasy.

"Yeah." Jacob frowns. "But Kane never found this place before and he's not gonna find it now. The only folks who know where he is are you four."

"What?" Texas glances up—he's been poking Chuck's nose instead of listening. "—why, what's somebody gonna do?"

"…whatever they want," Dutch says, and hunches his shoulders uncomfortably. "…I mean…he's _shut off._ I dunno if he has emergency protocols for if…if somebody starts cutting him up or somethin', but…if somebody did get to him when he's shut off it could be real bad."

"Hey, let's not get all worked up about this," Jacob says firmly, as Texas starts to swell with affronted defensiveness. "Nobody's gonna break in and strip him for parts or nothin'. Nobody even knows where he's at. He's just gonna sleep for the next couple days, and then he'll be back."

"But—"

"You can sit around with him all you want while he's out if it makes you feel better," Jacob growls impatiently. "Not like he's gonna mind. But first let's get all this freakin' _blood_ off my table!"

Clean-up goes pretty fast with all hands on deck, even though Dutch is obviously completely uncomfortable being near the giant, rusty-brown splatter of drying blood and Texas won't stop suddenly yelling in Chuck's ear or poking him in the ribs, trying to make him wake up. ROTH hovers, whirring quietly with concern—when Dutch mutters _shutdown repair cycle_ he beeps understandingly and pats Chuck's head.

"You should go shower," Julie tells Mike while Jacob explains to Texas that no, he should absolutely not touch the IV at all no matter what, no for _no reason at all ever._ "You're…" she gestures—Mike looks down and sees blood all over his shirt, smeared up his arms and over his hands.

"…hey, could be worse," he says, because that's better than the sort of wordless groaning noise his body is trying to make. The words come out a little bit strangled. "Coulda been wearing my jacket."

"Mike, are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

Julie narrows her eyes at him. "…no," she says, gentle but firm. "…you're totally not. You're not blaming yourself for this, are you?"

Mike opens his mouth automatically to deny it, and then stops at the look on her face.

"…I should have protected him," he says instead.

"Mike…"

"Don't be dumb," Texas says firmly, and smacks Mike on the back. "Listen, little man. He's not gonna die, you got him back and he's gonna have a _totally_ sweet scar. This is _awesome_."

"Texas…" Dutch sighs and shakes his head, then looks back at Mike. "…listen, man. We get hurt. It happens."

"If he hadn't been—what he is—"

"He is, though."

"And he totally took down a Hound!"

"Texas! Dude, seriously!"

"What?"

"What we're saying," Julie says, "…is that you're being too hard on yourself, and it's not your job to keep us from getting hurt. I know you know that. We talked about this the first time we met the Duke, remember?"

It seems like a hundred years ago, now.

"We gotta clean this mess up," says Mike, instead of answering, and scrubs absently at his bloody arms with equally-bloody hands. "…got everywhere."

"…yeah," says Julie, and he knows she wants to keep pushing, but she must see on his face how tired he suddenly is. "I'll wash his hair."

It's the two of them, in the end. Julie pulls out some of the bottles of Deluxe hair product Claire not-so-secretly brings down for her. The strange, chemical-sweet smell doesn't quite drown out the rusty bitterness of the blood, but it makes it less choking, at least. Julie hums quietly to herself as she works, picking apart hair matted with blood and dust.

Which means Mike gets to get Jacob's scissors and cut away the stiff, blood-soaked fabric of Chuck's shirt. There are bruises under the blood, too-clear ribs under the bruises. More faint, Deluxian scars from his collarbones to his navel, trailing down the sides of his neck from either eye, wrapped around each arm under the bicep, marking out the places Kane Co. cut and replaced and _changed_ him. Mike wrings the blood out of his rag and doesn't think about the look on Chuck's face a second before the Hound grabbed him. The places Chuck gripped Mike's arm are already bruising dark, angry purple and red, and he concentrates on the way they ache instead of how with his hair pulled back and wet, Chuck looks white as paper. His face is completely, awfully still, not so much as a twitch, if Mike couldn't feel the heartbeat under his ribs he'd think Chuck was—

…think he was—

"Mike?"

Julie has stopped washing—her water is muddy red-brown. Mike shakes himself awake and realizes he's standing there still, staring at his best friend's face, one hand pressed over his heart. He pulls his hand away and picks up his rag again, but he's done more than he thought and there's nothing left to clean. Puts the rag down. Picks it back up again. Why is there nothing to do with his hands?

"You done?" Julie's voice is really soft.

"He hates not having a shirt on," says Mike, because priorities are priorities, and turns numbly toward the door. "I'm gonna—"

"Mike."

"—a blanket or something. What?"

"Come here."

"What?" Mike's arms are still streaked bloody, clean below the wrist where he's had his hands in the water. He scrubs absently at them with the rag, aching as he presses too hard on the bruises. "Why? Jules, I'm fine. I'm not even hurt."

Julie starts to walk around the table to him—Mike takes a jerky step back before he can stop himself, wrings out the rag and starts scrubbing the other arm. He needs out of here. Right now would be awesome, right now—

"Mike."

Julie's hand is cool when it rests over his and he freezes, startled by the touch even though he saw her coming, frozen where he is. The look on her face is same one she had when she found his cell in Kane Co. tower, saw him chained up and bruised and looked at him just like she's looking at him now.

But he's not _hurt_ now, Chuck is hurt, and it's Mike's fault and he doesn't deserve to have somebody look at him like that.

"I'm fine," he says again, and pulls away from her hand. Julie steps after him and takes his hand, pulls the rag gently out of his fingers. Sets it down on the table. "What? Hah—seriously. Stop looking at me like that. I didn't get hurt."

"Mm." Julie just…looks at him. It's hard to meet her eyes.

"I didn't even land a hit, he took it out before it got close to me."

"I know."

"It threw him really hard, Jules, he was—we should take him to a doctor."

"We will."

She still has a hand on his. His hands feel sticky, dirty, there's no blood on them but he can still feel it on his skin. And Julie's hands—

"You okay?"

Julie looks up at him and cocks her head on one side a little. "…why?"

"Your hands are shaking."

Julie folds up one square, calloused hand in both of hers, and her hands are perfectly steady. "…no," she says, and squeezes his trembling fingers. "No they're not, Mike."

There's nothing to say. Mike stares at their hands, trying to force them still—they just shake, steady and unstoppable.

"Do you…want to talk about it?"

Wow, he must be pretty pathetic right now. Julie doesn't like "talking" much, if she's trying to get him to open up she must be seriously worried. Mike laughs a little, tight and sharp.

"What is there to talk about, Jules?"

"How about how you look like you're gonna puke?" Julie puts a hand on his shoulder, looks up at him unwavering. "You're really pale, Mike. I don't have to have known you as long as he has to know when you're in the mood to do something dangerous and dumb."

"I'm not gonna do anything."

"Pretty sure we both know that's not true." Her voice is gentle, but steady. Mike looks away, rubbing his hands together, trying to shake off the feeling of blood clinging to the cracks of his skin and under his nails, and doesn't meet her eyes. "He needs you _here,_ " Julie says, undeterred, pressing now. "Not out without him, picking fights and looking for—for _excuses_ to get hurt."

Mike jerks, back straightening, head snapping up, but Julie doesn't back down from the sudden sharpness of his glare.

"You've told me the same stuff over and over, Mike," she says. "You keep telling me 'he got hurt' and then 'I didn't' and you always blame yourself for everything—so do you get why I'm worried? I mean—you see it, right?"

 _I'm the one who deserved to get hurt._

But he can't say that, she's already upset. "I'm not gonna hurt myself or anything, Jules, seriously."

"I know you're not." Julie keeps a hold of his arm as he tries to shrug her off. "But putting yourself in danger on purpose is you all over and that's what I'm scared of and you know it. Promise me you'll stay in the hideout."

He doesn't _want_ to stay cooped up in the stupid hideout, he doesn't want to sit around and stew in his own failure, he needs to burn off all this sick, jittery tightness in his chest before it chokes him. Mike frowns and stays rebelliously silent.

" _Mike_."

"Why should I?" It comes out sulkier than he means it to.

"Because you're going to get _hurt!_ "

"Maybe that needs to happen!"

" _Bullshit_!"

The shout is so unexpected Mike takes a step back, shocked. Julie is still glaring at him, not giving an inch of ground, but her eyes are wet and too bright.

"…bull," she says again, and scrubs the wetness angrily away from her eyes. "I thought you _got this,_ Mike, we take care of ourselves and when we get hurt we deal with it."

"I know, but—"

"Mike." The way she says his name is painful, _understanding,_ too gentle. "Mike, you're hurting, I know, you're scared. But don't take it out on yourself. He'll be okay."

 _I'm not scared I'm not scared not scared I'm NOT—_

"Come here," says Julie, and Mike stiffens as she reaches out gently and pulls at his shoulder, guiding him back toward one of the scattered kitchen chairs. "C'mere, cowboy. Get down here where I can reach you already."

"I'm—I don't—"

"Shhh."

Sitting down she's short enough he has to kneel down to let her hold him, and her hands are small and cool on his back and the nape of his neck, stroking his hair away and trailing her nails gently over his skin. She feels so small when he rests a blood-streaked hand on her back.

" _You didn't do anything wrong,_ " she says, and the words shouldn't mean anything because he _knows_ that, he's not an idiot. His chest aches anyway, a tight, miserable throb.

" _I have to keep you guys_ safe."

Julie rubs slowly back and forth between his shoulderblades. "…he won't blame you for any of this when he wakes up, y'know. You do know that, right? Because I can tell you 100% for sure that he'll be just as happy to see you as he always is."

"But—"

"Do you trust me, Mike?"

He does. He really does, but…he didn't get there in time and he can still hear the noise Chuck made when he woke up and they were working on his arm, the choked noises as the pain started to register. Mike should've been faster. Smarter, stronger, _better._

"So trust me now." Julie pats his back once, firmly. "It's gonna be fine. It wasn't your fault, _nobody_ thinks it was your fault. Okay? We're all just glad you brought both of you back safe. Don't be too hard on yourself."

She hesitates, and then pulls him down a little bit further to brush his bangs aside and lay an awkward peck of a kiss on his forehead. The knot in Mike's chest tightens, crushes his windpipe and he really doesn't know if he can talk around it so he just nods instead.

"Good." Julie steps back, pulling in on herself again, closing off. "Yeah, okay. Now—just—go take a shower. I'll keep an eye on him while you're gone."

* * *

Mike's showers are usually quick, but he stays in there a long time today, eyes closed, head bowed, feeling the scalding water beat his skin. In Deluxe, the water's perfect. Down here, the pressure's so high it stings. Right now, he wouldn't have it any other way. He still feels wrong in his own skin, jittery, like if he looks down there's going to be blood on his hands.

He keeps running through what happened in his head, over and over again, like somebody who can't stop poking at a wound. The sting doesn't fade, fresh and sharp every time he remembers Chuck's eyes flickering out dark and empty, the way his body slammed into the ground after the Hound threw him, the way he screamed and struggled against Mike's grip when Jacob was working on his arm.

Mike scrubs at his hands and turns his face up into the stinging spray. Breathes.

By the time he gets out again, feeling scoured and drained, the last traces of Deluxe sunlight have died off and the Motorcity skyline is nothing but darkness and neon light. Chuck turns out to be in the guest bedroom now, the one they keep just in case somebody needs somewhere to crash—with the IV still in and Chuck's arm still bleeding spottily through the bandages, putting a shirt on him wasn't an option but somebody has covered him up with a blanket.

If Mike didn't know him better he might look like he was sleeping, but Chuck never sleeps laid out neatly under a blanket. He takes up the whole bed and kicks off the blankets and occasionally flails a hand out for a pillow to curl up around. Lying flat and still and cold like this, he looks more like a corpse.

Texas is sitting by the side of the bed—when he notices Mike standing in the doorway, and swivels around in his chair and gives him one of those weirdly intense Texas looks.

"Lizzie said you'd like havin' somebody here to watch Chuck," he says, like he doesn't actually care. His gunchucks are laid across his knees. "She went back up to paint that other chick's nails or somethin'."

So Claire called. That could mean Kane's working on something and she heard the rumors or she's just tired of Julie being down in Motorcity and wants to hang out with her friend. At this point Mike doesn't even know which one he hopes it is.

"How's he doin'?"

Texas glances down at Chuck and scratches the back of his neck, considering. "…dunno. Quiet." He taps his fingers on his gunchucks. He looks unusually solemn, brows knitted fiercely as if in intense concentration.

"…no ninja attacks then."

That gets the intended reaction—Texas sets up, distracted from whatever he was thinking about, and grins his crooked grin. "Nuh-uh," he says. "Ninjas are lame anyway, I would _so_ beat up a ninja. Nobody's gonna get close to this nerd while Daddy TEXAS is here!" He pats Chuck's chest firmly. "Gotta protect the nerds."

"Yeah." Mike settles down too. "You're just…hanging out in here?"

"I got a movie," says Texas, and pokes Chuck's arm. He doesn't move. "…man, it's super-weird, him bein' quiet like this. Where's the screams? Who's gonna do all the screaming, 'cause it is _not_ gonna be Texas."

"It's not like he's not gonna wake up again." Which is something it didn't occur to Mike to worry about, so that's great. Add it to the endless list. "He's just sleeping. Kind of."

"Nah, when he's sleeping he makes noise and moves around and stuff." Texas crosses his arms and frowns at Chuck's still face. "Sometimes he yells, like, _MIKE OH MY GOD WE'RE GONNA DIE_."

Mike, who has heard more than his fair share of Chuck sleep-yelling at imaginary versions of Mike and then waking up gasping, doesn't comment. His driving is fine and if it was too bad Chuck wouldn't drive with him. Chuck still drives with him, and that's the important part.

"I don't like it," says Texas, with finality. "It's weird."

And that's about as close as he's gonna get to admitting he's worried. Mike sits back and sighs. "…yeah," he says. "I don't like it either, Tex."

* * *

72 hours has never been so long. Mike reluctantly does as he's told and stays put—he spends most of the time hanging out next to Chuck's bedside, occasionally ducking out and obsessively tuning up Mutt or cleaning until Jacob yells at him to stop. He waits. Hangs out with Dutch and doesn't sleep. Fights Texas and doesn't sleep. Avoids Julie's sharp, worried glances and doesn't sleep.

Chuck himself doesn't do much to warrant all the attention he's getting—he lies silent and still and doesn't move. Once, Mike glances over and sees him shaking, almost invisibly, twitching and shivering all over. "Y'know how stiff you'd get just lyin' there not movin' at all for three days?" Jacob asks when Mike calls him up. "It's part of the program, don't worry about it."

Mike worries anyway. After that Jacob takes to wandering in every so often, mumbling a couple of words to Chuck and scanning the screen that pops up—then he'll nod to himself, give Mike a brusque pat on the back, and leave again. It's probably mostly for show, but Mike appreciates it anyway, if only to see some sign of life, any kind of response at all. If Chuck can still hear Jacob's voice, he's still there. He's not…gone.

Julie comes back a day and a half in, looking harried and carrying a small stash of precious Deluxe supplies. There's a gash on her arm—when Mike tries to grill her over it she dumps the supplies in his arms and waves him off with that hard, burning look in her eyes he's seeing more and more these days. It reminds him of something—of rows of hands raised in salute, of something that hurts to think about too hard. He takes the stuff to Jacob, and then comes to sit back down next to Julie in silence, close enough their shoulders touch.

"Not gonna go help Jacob?" she asks, after a minute.

"…hard to help somebody who doesn't want it."

Julie crosses her arms, hides the cut and doesn't answer, but she does lean into his shoulder a little, just enough to feel her there.

They all wait.

Mike is sitting by the bed when the timer Jacob set up for him hits 72 hours and Chuck's eyes snap open like a switch flipping on.

For a minute he lies perfectly still, staring at the ceiling—a screen flickers up in front of him, a long string of numbers and tiny text scrolls across it too fast to follow and then he blinks and it's gone. Chuck groans, stretches and rolls over. Mike, who was frozen and staring, jerks upright and hurries forward. He's the only one there—that's probably good. Chuck usually wakes up pretty groggy and it's rare for Texas's presence in a situation to make it _less_ confusing.

"…Chuck?"

"… _Mikey,_ " Chuck says, dazed and hoarse. "…hey. Wh'happened?"

"Hey." Mike reaches out, hesitates and then carefully pats Chuck's shoulder. Chuck rolls his head on the pillow to stare at him, and the shadows under his eyes so freakin' dark, did he always look that tired? "Glad you're up. Uh…what do you remember?"

Chuck winces. "…the bot," he says, and the memory seems to burn most of the sleepiness away—it kind of sucks, watching the tension and anxiety come flooding back. "I couldn't feel my arm and I kept getting error messages—it—hurt. A lot. Lot of hurting going on, ha. I saw a weak spot and I shot it and then you were tying up my arm, which also sucked pretty bad, and I was trying really hard not to think about how I was gonna die—uh…I think I blacked out after that."

Okay, good. So he doesn't remember—

"…and then you guys were putting my arm back on," says Chuck, and shudders. His other hand rises to the bandages cautiously, just barely touching like he's afraid it'll hurt. "That was…bad." By the sort of sickly greyish color he's turning, "bad" doesn't really cover it. "… _really_ bad," he amends, and swallows hard. "I…don't wanna do that again, ever."

"Sorry."

Chuck sighs and drops his hand away from his arm again. "Wasn't your fault. And then you put me under for maintenance, right?" He shifts, groans, pushes himself up on an elbow. " _Ow._ How long…?"

"Three days."

"Seriously?" Chuck pushes himself up on the bed, straightening up carefully and wincing. "…jeez, no wonder I'm stiff."

"Sorry."

Chuck snorts and holds up his injured arm, staring at the bandages. "Mike, quit it. What are you even apologizing for? You're the only reason I've still got two hands."

"Yeah, but—"

"Dude, none of this is your fault."

Mike has a lot he'd like to say about that, but Chuck looks exhausted still and Mike knows he'll argue. So instead he asks "How's your arm?"

"Fingers are still kinda numb." Chuck wiggles his fingers and winces. "…it'll fix itself. It can't, like…put my arm back on, but it can fix the little stuff. I'm gonna be pretty useless for a while though."

"You're never useless," says Mike, but he still catches himself hovering when Chuck pushes himself forward and starts to swing his legs over the side of the bed. "—you sure you should get up yet? You lost a lot of blood—"

"I'm fine."

"Maybe you should—"

" _Mike,_ seriously, you can back off. I'm fine." Chuck pushes himself up onto his feet, stretching his arms to the ceiling with a relieved groan. And then he drops his arms, says "—oh _shit_ , head-rush—" and goes over like a tree.

Mike, who didn't back off at all when he was told to, dives forward and manages to catch him before he hits the floor, but it's a pretty close-run thing. Chuck is already starting to stagger and move again as Mike pushes him upright and back onto the bed, but he's too dizzy to do more than shove weakly and make complaining noises and Mike is not in the mood to listen to them right now.

"I told you, you need to _stay put_ ," he says firmly, and puts a hand on Chuck's shoulder as he tries stubbornly to push himself back onto his feet. "—no, quit. You're gonna get hurt."

"I have been saying _all of that stuff_ to you _every day of our lives,_ " Chuck says, a little bleary but sharp enough Mike winces. "—when have you listened to me? Literally _never._ "

"I listen to you!"

"I'm getting up, Mikey. I ran a diagnostic, I'm _fine._ "

"You just passed out!"

Chuck colors a little bit. "—I stood up too fast, that's easy to fix. And you can't stop me getting up! You're—" he pushes on the hand on his shoulder—Mike doesn't shift. "—okay, you're a lot better at stopping me from doing things than I am at stopping you, _great,_ but you can't just stand here forever. I'm getting out of this bed, Mike."

"Okay! Okay." Mike steps back, pulling his hands away. "…but…just be careful, okay?"

It might be a sign they've been around each other too long, how Mike can tell Chuck is rolling his eyes. He stands up slower this time, careful—Mike immediately reaches out to catch him again, but he just sways a little in place.

"…you good?"

"I mean I just went a little bit deaf for a second," says Chuck, and blinks rapidly, shaking his head. "—nhhbut I'm okay. Yeah, I'm good."

"You should—"

"I'm not going back to bed." Chuck scowls fiercely and takes a couple of wobbly steps toward the door. "—I'm starving and I'm bored and I'm really stiff and I need a shower."

"Okay!" Mike hurries after him. "Okay. Look—here." He slides in closer, hooks Chuck's good arm around his shoulders and feels Chuck resist for a minute before collapsing gratefully into the support, leaning heavily on his shoulder. "Last thing we need is you passing out on your way down the stairs."

"I'm good," says Chuck again, against all evidence to the contrary. "I'm fine." But he doesn't try to step away as Mike helps him down the stairs into the living room. His bruised side where he landed after the Hound threw him must still be sore, because he limps a little as they slowly work their way down the stairs. Mike holds him as tight as he dares and takes it one step at a time.

It's pretty quiet downstairs when they eventually get there. It's early afternoon and the others are all scattered around the room, playing cards or talking. Nobody really looks up when the door opens, until Mike clears his throat and Julie looks up at him and goes wide-eyed.

"Guys!"

"What?" Dutch is buried in sketches, with at least three pencils stuck haphazardly behind his ear—he looks up and drops his sketchbook. "Texas!"

All of a sudden everybody is one their feet and running over. Chuck waves weakly, looking more than a little bit shell-shocked, then grunts and staggers sideways against Mike as the other Burners push in for a group hug. Texas, as usual, makes an attempt to pick everybody up—Mike's face gets squished against Chuck's shoulder and Chuck has to twist awkwardly to avoid burying his face in Dutch's afro, but it's warm and close and great.

Everybody is asking questions almost before they start to pull away—Dutch wants to know how the arm is healing, Julie wants to know if he should be up yet and if he's taken anything for pain, Texas wants to make it super clear that he was really boring when he was passed out and he shouldn't do it again because it was _lame_. That was _lame_ and he shouldn't do it again. Everybody pretends not to notice him rub his eyes hastily on his sleeve.

"Jacob made you a sling." Dutch offers it carefully. "—it was pretty plain so I spiced it up a little bit, I hope it looks okay."

Chuck takes the sling carefully, running his fingers over the painstakingly-painted golden lightning bolts.

"It looks great," he says, and scrubs his face roughly with his good arm. "…hi guys."

"You beat a Hound!" Texas sounds grudgingly impressed—Chuck stares at him, looking frankly alarmed. "Without a car. Woulda figured only Texas could pull that off."

"I mean—I didn't finish it off, Mike—"

"—was down, before you took that shot," Mike finishes for him. "It got my staff, I was pretty screwed. How did you do that, anyway? Mutt's cannons couldn't even get through those things' armor."

"I just got a good look, and there's a hole in the armor on its neck," Chuck says, and pokes at his own neck with his good hand, in the hollow of his throat under his jaw. "…like, right here? To give the jaw room to articulate, I guess. I dunno, it all made a lot of sense when I was basically concussed. It's a pretty small target, but it wasn't moving a lot—"

"You saw that all the way from where you were?" Mike whistles. Chuck stutters, flustered. "You just about took its head off for me."

"Well," says Chuck, in that tone of voice that means he intends to argue a point, and Mike shakes his head and pulls the sling out of his hands.

"Gimme your arm, let's get this set up."

"I—fine, okay." Chuck lifts his arm, and then stops abruptly, frowning, and pulls up a screen. "—hold on."

"What?" Mike leans in, squinting, trying to read. The text is really small—Chuck elbows him back a little and reads, lips moving silently.

"…It's from the kingdom," he says finally. "—I mean, the—my group." He squints at the screen. "…what's today?"

Mike looks around—Dutch and Texas both shrug. "Monday," says Julie. "Come on, guys."

"There's no meet-ups on Mondays," says Chuck, and starts to bring up his hands, pulling up a keyboard—a second later he winces all over, curling around his injured arm. " _Ffff_ —ow."

"You okay?" Mike starts forward—Chuck waves him off and straightens cautiously back up again, still holding his arm tight against his side.

"I'm okay—I'm okay, Mike, it's cool." He frowns at his keyboard, then raises his good hand and pokes at it, typing slowly one key at a time. "…what…are…you…"

"You want me to type it for you?" Dutch offers—Chuck blinks, looks around and then sighs and shakes his head.

"No, I just…here. I'll…"

Mike recognizes the way his eyes go distant this time. Chuck's hands drop to his sides and his lips move a little, silently, as words flicker up on his screen. Dutch leans in, staring at the sliver of Chuck's eyes visible through his hair—his irises are glowing faintly blue again in the shadows under his bangs.

"They saw me come online when I woke up," says Chuck after a second, as Thurman's response pops up. "…he says I left some stuff there and he needs me to come pick it up because his mom doesn't want it in his room." Julie snorts—Chuck glances at her. "—he's serious," he says earnestly. "…his mom's scary. Mike, we gotta go let them know I'm okay."

Mike is about to suggest dinner first—he's starving, Chuck has to be even hungrier—but Chuck just turns with a resolute look on his face and starts hobbling toward Mutt on his stiff legs, wobbling a little bit but determined.

"Whoa, whoa." Mike pulls him back, half-laughing, half worried. "You sure you should be driving anywhere right now?"

"Mikey, they saw me get my arm ripped off and they didn't get to see it get fixed like you did, they gotta be _freaking out_."

That's…fair, actually. Mike sent a couple of brief messages to Ruby and Thurman, the only two who he has channels for, but he knows Chuck's got a lot more friends and casual acquaintances in the group who are probably mostly out of the loop and scared. Well—well fine. They can eat while they're out. Chuck's arm is back on and he's had time to heal and he's _awake_ and there's no reason they can't go out driving like they always do.

That's all well and good, but Mike still stays on the shy side of 150 mph on the way to the battlefield, and pretends he doesn't see Chuck glancing at him every time he takes a corner slowly. If he has a problem with Mike driving carefully, he doesn't mention it. They park a little ways from the battlefield in their normal spot, and Chuck slides his arm into his sling and unfolds himself from his seat with a quiet groan.

"I can walk on my own," he says, when Mike starts to come around to car, reaching for him. "Seriously, Mikey, stop _hovering_. You're driving me nuts."

"I'm not hovering," says Mike, and hastily pulls his hands back when Chuck gives him a skeptical look. "What? I'm totally not hovering, I'm just…y'know, worried."

"So you're hovering." Chuck twists—his spine pops sharply. " _Mmh_. If I fall over again, _then_ you can start helping me places. I got this, though."

The battlefield comes into sight as they climb up to the ridge of dirt and sand that overlooks it. Chuck, true to his word, gets up the hill just fine, although he does stop at the top and sway a little bit in a way that makes Mike's shoulders tense up abruptly. There's a crowd on the battlefield—a couple of the kids down there Mike knows from previous weekends hanging out with Chuck, but looking very different in hoodies and T-shirts instead of cloaks and makeshift armor. Some of them aren't even from Chuck's side, and Mike is starting to have a sneaking suspicion of what's going on here.

Nobody notices them until they're almost to the bottom of the hill, and then one sharp-eyed kid says "—here he comes!" and the whole crowd is turning to look at them.

"Uh," says Chuck, apparently paralyzed in the face of the sudden attention, and then somebody yells "Lord Vanquisher!" and the whole group comes rushing over. The ones who know the Burners better crowd in closest, run the fastest, and Ruby actually breaks out of the pack and hugs Chuck so tightly he goes _hrk_! And staggers, then wraps his good arm around her and gives her a cautious squeeze. The Oracle is at the back of the pack somewhere, but his voice blares over top of the crowd, already recounting the story of Chuck totally fighting off a Hound one-handed. Thurman follows up on Ruby's heels, dithers anxiously for a second and then steps in and hugs Chuck too, pulling away abruptly and slapping him awkwardly on the shoulder.

"Are you okay?" Ruby pulls back and straightens her jacket self-consciously. "…nice sling."

"Thanks," says Chuck, and glances around at the circle of staring faces around them, looking unnerved. "Uh…what's…everybody doing here?"

"We wanted to make sure you were okay," somebody says earnestly from the crowd, and then the rest of them are all chiming in as well, "How did you put it back on?" "Are you okay now?" "—ripped right off oh my god—" "We set up its body in your throne room it looks totally—" "—so cool that was _so cool_ —" "—your arm—?"

"My arm's gonna be fine," says Chuck, and wincingly removes it from the sling. Curling his fingers into a fist still makes him grimace, but it's not as jerky as it was when he first woke up. "See? It's cool, I'm…I'm good."

"Your arm was made of _metal,_ " Thurman says. "—what was that?! That's so cool. Are you a robot?"

"No!" The word comes out sharp and abrupt, almost angry—Chuck winces as his friends pull back, startled. "—no, I'm—it's kinda weird, okay, but I'm not a...no."

"You saw him bleeding," Mike points out. Thurman pales a little bit at the reminder. "He's just as human as I am. Okay?"

"Sorry."

"No, it's—fine." Chuck elbows Mike a little—Mike steps back. "Look, I just—I don't want this to make things different or—or anything. I'm still exactly the same person who was here last week, and—"

"Of course you are," says Ruby forcefully. Chuck blinks at her, cut off and shocked, and she crosses her arms firmly and raises her voice. "You're our king!"

A cheer, ragged but enthusiastic. Chuck ducks his head and mumbles something incoherent, but he's grinning too widely to hide. Mike bumps his shoulder, grinning.

"Yes," says a clear, cool voice, and a girl in very sharp eyeliner comes forward out of the crowd, raising her hands for silence. The de facto leader of the opposing side, the girl whose strategy almost sunk Chuck's army the week before the entire "cyborg" mess went down in the first place. Mike's been playing with this crowd just long enough he feels himself tense up at the sight of her, ready to defend Chuck from any crown-stealing coup attempts.

But that doesn't seem to be what the girl has in mind at all. "All hail Lord Vanquisher," she says clearly, and drops elegantly to one knee. Her people glances at each other, then, hesitantly, kneel as well. "You saved our lives."

"What?" Chuck snorts. "No. I mean, Mike—"

"I was in a corner, dude," says Mike, and squeezes him a little bit closer. "Can't believe you hit a target that small. And that's bleeding and missing an arm, ten seconds after you slammed your head into the ground. Pretty awesome."

"Boom!" Ruby says, and mimes pulling back a slingshot. "—right in the eye! What a shot!"

"You win this weekend," says the queen, and holds out a neatly-folded bundle of green and gold cloth. It takes Mike a second to recognize the cloak Chuck shrugged off when the Hound showed up—the battered fabric looks ragged but clean, like somebody took it home and washed it. The pin with the golden crown on it gleams on top of the folded fabric. "For saving my life on the field of battle, I owe you my life. Though I may not pledge service to mine mortal enemy, I recognize the courage and honor of a warrior and a king." She straightens up—the other Bardionians stand too, looking slightly sheepish. "—next time we won't be going easy on you," she says, and pins the pin firmly on Chuck's sling. "Your throne almost fell this time, _Vanquisher._ "

She turns sharply on her heel and sweeps off across the battlefield. Chuck's ragtag army watches her go for a few seconds, then closes in on the gap she left, chattering again.

"Okay!" Ruby yells over top of the noise, and claps her hands sharply. The talking grinds to a halt and Mike, who can see people in the background craning to see, nudges Ruby and holds out his hands. She huffs, rolls her eyes and then nods. Mike reaches down, carefully takes hold of her waist, and boosts her up into the air to settle on his shoulder, towering over the crowd.

"If you're a centaur, go get the food," Ruby orders from her new heights of authority. "Go set up the stuff we brought. Before everything gets cold! You can talk to him once the food's ready!"

Everybody troops off, and Mike lowers Ruby back down again carefully. "Someday I'll be tall enough you won't get to do that anymore," she says with dignity, and brushes off her jeans.

"Yeah, I bet you will," says Mike, and straightens his jacket. "So what's up? What's going on?"

"We'll set it up," says Ruby firmly, and starts to hurry after the rest of the retreating crowd, half-shouting over her shoulder. "—you just stay there!"

"I—oh. Okay?" Chuck settles down carefully on the dirt, wincing as he bends his bruised leg—Mike follows him down, settling on the warm dust.

For a while, it's quiet. On the other side of the field, somebody has opened the back of the Oracle's van and is unloading something. Somebody else is laying out what look like old-fashioned picnic blankets. Chuck blows his bangs out of his eyes for a second and slumps forward, pulling his un-bruised knee up to his chest and resting his good arm on top of it.

"…so I guess you're the king again," says Mike, quiet in the windy warmth. A shadow skims over the beams of light filtering down from Deluxe; somebody's pod drifting past. Chuck makes a quiet, agreeing noise, distracted. Okay, so maybe he doesn't want to talk right now. That's cool too.

Mike leans back on his hands, stares out at the pools of sunlight, and thinks about ancient videos of sunny skies and drifting clouds and rain. Kane Co. doesn't like weather, and apart from the mess with the Climator a couple of months ago Motorcity is too well-buried below Deluxe's shell to see any of the weather it used to see.

Mike would like to see rain some day. Real Motorcity rain.

"…kinda surprised she handed it back."

Mike blinks and glances over—Chuck is watching the battlefield too, but there's a twitch, an angle to his head that makes Mike think behind his bangs he just glanced over. "The crown," he clarifies when Mike just looks back at him, confused. "I'm surprised Jess just handed it over like that." He rubs absently at his bad arm, wincing a little bit, still looking out contemplatively at his imaginary kingdom. "…I think I liked fighting Mad Dog better. She's…intense. Y'know she's started going by 'The Serpent'? It's creepy. Snakes are creepy."

"There's worse animals." Mike pats his back. "You could be up against Lady Julie the—"

"Don't say it."

"—Kitten," Mike finishes, and laughs as Chuck shoves him. "Okay, okay! Sorry. You know I know how to keep my mouth shut, dude, I'm not gonna tell anybody."

"Man, I don't get to have any secrets anymore," says Chuck, and there's just enough honest aggravation under his joking tone of voice to send a cold ache through Mike's chest. Chuck glances over at him again and sighs. "No—Mike, no. It's okay. I'm not saying you—"

"Chuck!" It's Ruby, echoing from across the battlefield with the piercing force only the oldest of five siblings could muster. "Hey! We brought pizza!"

"Oh thank god," says Chuck, and pushes himself clumsily up. "I'm starving."

Most of the people involved in the group don't have a lot of income, especially the younger boys and girls, but everybody has chipped in and there's enough pizza for everybody. Everybody wants to talk to Chuck, but Chuck is busy, apparently trying to put away an entire large pizza by himself. Mike fields questions for him, and occasionally Chuck swallows a huge bite of cheese to interject or correct. Not metal, bio-organic polymers. Not a computer, a neural interfacing complex.

It's nice, hanging out. The Burners are great, Mike loves all of them, but watching Chuck settle in and debate things Mike doesn't understand with kids who share his interests is a good feeling. Too often, Chuck is the one left out of things, not sure if he fits in.

"You should see your throne room," says Thurman, and everyone nods enthusiastically. "We moved the bot in there, it looks awesome!"

"We had to use Thurman's van," Ruby contributes, "—that thing is huge!"

" _That's what she said,_ " somebody mumbles. Chuck snorts and chokes on his pizza.

"Yeah, we should go see the Hound," says Mike quickly, and pushes himself up. "—Jacob restocked the emergency first aid kit, we can put it back under the throne."

"We don't need to have –" starts Chuck, like he does every time, and then he stops and sighs. "…shit. Okay, fine, you get to say it this time."

"I told you so," Mike says, and slaps his back. "Field safety's important."

"You're full of crap," Chuck says, and picks up another piece of pizza. "Here, I wanna come too. Help me up."

The "hovering" part of Mike wants to tell him to stay sitting down, get some rest, but he pushes that reaction down and reaches down to pull Chuck up too. He wobbles a little bit when he gets back onto his feet, but he steadies a few seconds later and Mike pats his back carefully and starts walking back toward the distant shape of Mutt on the edge of the field.

"…okay," Chuck says, when they're far enough away the group can't hear him, and pulls his arm carefully out of the sling again. "…but while we got the kit out, uh…I wanna take the bandages off."

"Seriously?"

Chuck grimaces. "…everybody's asking me how it's healing," he says, and presses carefully at the bandages. "And I don't know because I haven't seen it. it's starting to freak me out."

Yeah, that's…reasonable. "Sure," says Mike, and elbows open Mutt's door, reaching awkwardly under the seat to pull out the restocked first-aid kit. "Yeah, we can do that."

"Let's get pretty far away first, though." Chuck glances nervously back at his friends. "…I don't…want them to see. Y'know. Could be kinda freaky."

"Well, we're goin' to the throne room anyway." Mike swings the first aid kit under his arm. "Let's go take a look."

Don't hover. Don't _hover_ , don't help him up the steps, he's _fine._ Mike definitely doesn't have a hand a few inches behind Chuck's back, just in case he trips as they climb up the platforms of junk toward the makeshift shelter of the "throne room".

"So…it'll be okay taking them off, though? It's not still…weird?"

"Weird?" Chuck snorts again. "Good science, Mikey."

"Sorry, okay?" But it softens the edge of the anxiety a little bit, seeing him laugh. "It was, though. I picked up your…arm…and it was weird. Really cold."

"Protocol," Chuck says, and settles down onto the step to lift his arm out of the sling. He keeps talking as he tugs at the bandages, unwrapping carefully, focusing on an invisible point somewhere in the distance like he doesn't want to see what his arm might look like under the bandages. "When my arm stopped getting signals from my brain, it started a preservation program, cooled itself off and clamped off the bleeding. Kept it…intact."

He takes a deep breath, squeezes his eyes shut and then pulls the last of the bandages away.

It's not as bad as some part of Mike was afraid it would be. There's a welted scar halfway down his upper arm, ugly with knotted sutures and cut-and-pasted sections of Kane Co. skin-bonding products, but clean and dry and closing well. Chuck flexes his arm slowly, then twiddles his fingers and makes a fist.

"…that's pretty good," he says, and taps the palm. A screen pops up. Closes his hand. The screen vanishes. "…the circuit re-established, so that's cool. Never really knew if that would work."

"So it's…healing?"

"Better than a normal arm." Chuck flexes his arm gingerly—the wound doesn't look swollen or infected, but there are some nasty bruises around where the flesh was torn, only now fading to ugly green-purple-brown. "Okay. Wrap me back up again?"

"Didn't think that one through, huh?" Mike settles down next to him and touches the scar carefully, barely brushing it with his fingertips—Chuck winces just a little and then reaches up as well, running a finger cautiously over his stitches. "…doesn't hurt, right?"

"No, there's a—"

"Protocol?"

"Shut up," Chuck says with dignity. "I have a lot of protocols, okay. The artificial nerves know there's muscle and tissue damage, so…it's kind of doing some painkilling for me. It hurts, but not nearly as bad as it probably should."

Mike flips open the first-aid kit, pulls out a roll of bandages and re-wraps Chuck's arm carefully. Chuck visibly relaxes when the stitches are hidden again.

"…so…" Mike picks up the first-aid kit again, snaps it shut and turns to look up at the piecemeal "throne" behind them. "…they weren't kidding."

The head of the Hound has been mounted on the back of the throne like the skull of some fallen beast. The bot's corpse has been hauled over and arranged behind the throne, a mess of scarred metal. Considering the throne is basically a fancy old chair with the "king of the realm" symbol painted on it, it's pretty impressive how regal it makes the whole thing look.

"…I gotta go sit in that," says Chuck, awed and gleeful, and shoves himself to his feet.

"Buddy, hold on—" but he's already on his feet and scrambling up to the chair. "You should take it slow, you've been out for three days!"

"Yeah, I was!" Chuck drops down in the chair, settles in with a satisfied grin. "Haha…do I look cool?"

"You look…yeah, you do." He does, too. The bot head looms over him, and even dorky, skinny Chuck in his jeans and his battered shoes looks pretty badass. "Here, kinda…slouch down, lean on the—yeah. Man, that seriously looks awesome."

"Well now I gotta stay king." Chuck swivels up onto his knees, poking at the Hound head. "Otherwise they're gonna take this when they take the throne room, and I totally took this thing down." He glances over, self-conscious. "…I mean, _we_ took—"

"Take the credit, bro."

"…I took this thing down," Chuck says again, and glances up at the Hound again. His back straightens a little bit. "…ha…wow."

"Wow is right."

"What's that?"

"I said—"

"No, no." Chuck waves him quiet, leaning in toward the head. "I mean…what's _that_?"

It's a gleam of gold, buried behind the Hound's shattered eye. Chuck reaches out, winces away from the broken glass and then gingerly picks shards of glass out of the way and reaches into the socket carefully.

It's a little golden orb with a red lens and little spidery tripod. Chuck turns it over in his fingers, then prods a couple of areas of it that don't look any different from the rest of it to Mike's eyes. After a couple of pokes, the tiny bot whirs and beeps and a screen pops up.

"…it's a…security camera?"

"A security camera?" Mike leans in, watching as Chuck frowns and starts typing. "It doesn't look like Deluxe tech."

"Yeah, no, definitely." Chuck presses a button and then winces as a huge red DENIED flashes across the screen. "—gold isn't Kane's style. Oo, here we go."

"This thing looks really familiar," says Mike, as the DENIED fizzles and vanishes.

"Yeah, kinda." Chuck is obviously not listening, focused on his screen—Mike frowns at the little bot, trying to remember. "Okay. Oh, there we go. So this thing was jacked into the Hound's navigation centers. Manufactured six weeks ago, blah blah blah test runs test runs…okay. So it's not remotely controlled or anything, it's just a signal beacon. The bot picks up the signal, the Hound goes in that direction."

"What signal?"

"The program deactivated when its target bot shut down. I don't think I can…uh…" Chuck hesitates, then glances over at Mike with a weirdly guilty look on his face. "Uh…I'm gonna make a bad decision right now."

"What?"

"I know that's your thing, but—"

"What bad decision?"

Chuck pulls up one of his screens, flicks his good hand and drags the content from the bot onto his monitor. The bot goes dark and shuts down—Chuck shivers and blinks a couple of times really fast, then sighs and relaxes.

"Chuck!"

"It was the fastest way to find it!" Chuck sounds defensive. "And— _and_ , I need to test my new firewalls. And they worked. Hey, at least I didn't jump off of anything! Y'know, like a _building._ You've got _no_ room to talk!"

"I—fine. Are you okay, though?" He looks okay—no stuttering, none of those weird micro-shutdowns.

"Yeah, I…I think so." Chuck closes his eyes for a second, a flicker under his bangs. "…I don't see anything. Don't feel anything, either."

"So…is it telling you to go anywhere?"

"Uh…" Chuck blinks, turning his head like he's trying to hear something. "…no, actually. It wants me to stay right here."

"Right here?" Mike looks around—there's nothing there except ragged makeshift buildings and Chuck's lovingly handmade throne. "There's nothing here."

"I know." Chuck frowns, concentrating. "—but that's what it wants, it wants me right here. Right where I am."

"Okay…so—"

Chuck's mouth drops open. Mike stops, concerned—Chuck looks down at himself slowly, then stands up abruptly and jogs a few steps forward.

"…Chuck?"

"Now I should stay here."

"What?"

Chuck drops down off the platform they've put the throne on, and half-runs over to the other side of the room. Mike follows, confused and more than a little bit worried now.

"Now I should stay _here,_ " says Chuck, and the tone of his voice now is _really_ worrying, because he sounds _angry_. Chuck gets mad sometimes, annoyed at Mike or Texas usually, but that's not the same thing as the slowly-rising tension in his voice. "Oh my god."

"Chuck, _what's going on_?"

"Come on, Mikey."

Chuck takes off, walking fast and angry back toward where Mutt is parked. Mike follows him, seriously worried now, pulling his keys out as he goes. Some of the LARPers start to get up, worried—Mike waves at them hastily and then settle back down, looking confused but reassured.

"Chuck! Talk to me, dude! What's going on?"

"Somebody set this thing up to follow a signal," Chuck says. "When I pulled the program and tried to use it, it told me to stay where I was."

"Yeah, so?"

"Mike—" Chuck rakes a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Wherever I go, that's where the signal is, come on! It's _my_ signal, it's tracking _me_!"

For a second, Mike stops dead in his tracks. Chuck keeps walking—Mike stares after him for a second, mouth hanging open, and then shakes himself awake and runs to catch up.

"Somebody _sent this thing after you_?"

"In my direction, yeah." Chuck walks faster, hands clenched into fists at his sides. "And I bet I know who." It's been a long time since Mike has heard Chuck sound this angry. He's walking so fast Mike has to half-jog to keep up with his longer strides. "I'm _sick_ of this! I'm sick of him messing with me!"

The memory finally clicks. The TV show. The surveillance bots on Mutt and the chemical tanker and the Duke's giant stupid head shooting lasers, and those little spider-bots watching the whole thing.

"…he _sent_ that thing?" Mike glances down again—Chuck has the surveillance bot clenched in one hand, white-knuckled. It's definitely the Duke's. "He was— _watching_ that, the whole time?" The words " _…and he didn't help_?" never make it out of his mouth. Why would he help? He got his _entertainment_ , he got to see Mike get almost eaten and then probably laughed his butt off watching through the Hound's dead eye as Mike panicked over first aid.

"He overrode me in my own head, he _hacked my brain_ , and now that he can't get into my eyes to spy on us he's using somebody else's!" Chuck is still talking as Mike processes—he slams open Mutt's passenger door. "I'm gonna go talk to him and then he's gonna shoot me and I'm so mad right now I basically don't even care. You'll get us out of there."

"Chuckles," says Mike, as patiently as possible—it makes sense, it _really_ makes sense and now that it's sinking in there's anger bubbling up in the pit of his stomach but— "Listen, if you go running in there and get hurt—"

"Mike, _get in_ and _drive._ "

Well, that's about all the reasonable objection Mike's got in him. He's never been the type to look before leaping. And besides, he has a couple things he'd like to say too, and it'd only be polite to do it face to face. Preferably within arms' reach.

"This is a stupid idea," Chuck says as Mike starts driving, but he doesn't sound like he's rethinking it. He's got a hand pressed to the stitches on his arm, and his mouth is bent into an angry frown.

"Yeah, but it was gonna happen sooner or later," says Mike philosophically, and races around a corner. They're not too far from the Duke's mansion where they are—that's good. "He can't just keep pushing." A thought occurs to him—he slows a little bit, frowning. "…what if he tries messing with your brain again?"

"We'll stop him." Chuck flicks open another screen, scrolling through, then flicks a line of text over to Mutt's main diagnostic panel. Mike glances down at it.

"…is this another one of those…registration-owner things?"

"Yeah, but I'm telling you to do it this time, so it's…it's cool right?"

It's not 100% cool, but nothing about this situation is. "What does it do?"

"Locks him out." Chuck winces as Mike turns a corner too fast, then continues doggedly, "—just completely shuts off his command privileges. It's gonna be kind of tough to make it work though, you're gonna have to talk pretty fast to _MIKE WHOA!_ "

Honestly, you'd think he'd be used to a little bit of freefall by now.

Chuck manages to go over the words with him ten or fifteen times before the Duke's mountain comes into view in the distance—the weird, formal phrasing doesn't come easily.

"You have to wait for me to finish initializing whatever you told me to do, override doesn't—"

"What if he jumps in?"

"Then you have priority. Listen, you have to get in fast but once you take over just make sure you get the words right. Okay?"

There are soldiers in the heaps of trash on either side of the road. Mike can see the faint gleam of their guns, almost hidden among the twisted scraps of metal and old car frames. He keeps his eyes fixed forward. "…got it."

"Wish Texas was here," says Chuck, a little wistfully. Mike glances over at him, eyebrows raised, mouth opening to ask—Chuck catches the movement and finishes, "—he'd _really_ punch him in the face."

"I can punch him in the face for you," says Mike, slightly injured. "If somebody's gotta punch him. I can punch."

"Yeah, well, he better not make you do that," Chuck says, and if his voice wasn't trembling slightly he would sound pretty intimidatingly grim. "He's used up all his second chances."

Mike kicks the door open and then, on an afterthought, deadlocks Mutt's doors. Chuck takes the lead again as they start to walk, surprisingly enough—he's still walking fast and angry, not as furious as he was before the drive but still pissed off. Mike reaches into his pocket, feeling the cool chrome of his staff's storage unit under his fingertips, and follows.

There's a squad of five of the Duke's sharply-dressed lackeys in the hallway inside the door, dusting paintings and cleaning up what looks like the aftermath of some kind of small explosion. There's golden paint all over the wall. Mike stops for a second, staring. Chuck turns back when he notices Mike isn't with him and then stops, also staring. One of the men in perfectly-pressed clothes is in the process, with great difficulty, of extracting what looks like a giant golden ninja throwing star buried in the wall.

"Y'got no appointment."

Mike just about jumps out of his skin. Chuck yelps and whips around, raising an arm for his weapons array—the Duke's second in command watches them both impassively and then, very deliberately, snaps her gum.

"We're not here to make trouble," says Mike—it comes out a lot less friendly and a lot more grim than he meant it to, but he keeps remembering the feeling of Chuck's blood dripping between his fingers and what the heck, it's not like he's famous for his impulse control. "Gonna need you to move."

Number Two raises an eyebrow and then, apparently deciding that it's not worth the trouble, steps smartly out of the way and falls in behind them, blowing another bubble and watching them impassively from behind her shades.

The Duke is polishing one of his cars when they come in—he looks up, does an outrageous double-take and then throws the rag randomly in the air (a lackey steps out of the shadows, picks it up and hurries away with it) and advances on them.

"Mr. Chilton!" He sounds pleased—Chuck swallows hard but doesn't step behind Mike this time. He's still tense all over, practically vibrating with rage. "…and _friend._ Heard you lost an arm the other day."

"Like you don't know," Mike says, voice hard. "Like you haven't been _spying_."

" _Mike_." The Duke puts on a tone of injured dignity. A muscle twitches in Mike's jaw. "You know I like to keep my finger on the _pulse_ of Motorcity. Don't I?" This to Number Two—she pops her gum.

"Yeah," she drawls. "Pulse of the city."

"So I heard you lost an arm," the Duke continues, "—but looks like you still have both your arms! That's some nice tech you're sitting on, and instead of doing something with it you just ride around with these bozos, screaming all the time. I can think of some _uses_ for digs like those."

"I don't want to know what you'd use it for," Chuck says, and his voice is shaking a little but it doesn't sound like fear. His good hand is clenched so tight at his side, his knuckles are pure white. "And this isn't how I wanted my research to be used, this isn't what I _wanted_ —"

"But you went for it, didn't you?" It's not aggressive or an accusation—The Duke sounds almost pitying, amused. It's completely infuriating. "They told you they could make you special and you went _right_ for it."

"I—" Chuck winces. _They told me I could stay in the barracks, I'd be able to keep up with you_ —it takes a heroic force of will not to haul off and break the Duke's stupid sunglasses. Mike grits his teeth and doesn't move. "I couldn't let them test it out on some kid who didn't know what was going on." And then, stronger, "—which was a good call, turns out, because they took it and they f—they screwed it up!"

"Are you telling me you think you could have made it _work_?"

Chuck pales. "No! I'm saying it's a good thing it got scrapped before more people ended up—"

"You think it could have worked."

"No," says Chuck again, and drags a hand through his hair, frustrated. "— _listen_ —"

"Don't play coy with me, now." The Duke swings his cane. His voice sounds joking still, almost lazy, but there's a threat to the set of his shoulders, an aggressive tension. "We already talked about lying."

"I'm not—"

"How much do you want?"

Chuck sputters. " _What?_ "

"For the plans they used to build you? Come on, you're smarter than that. You really think I'd believe there's no blueprint for this? No instructions to…" and he's too close again, swiping a finger sharply past the freckles on Chuck's face. "—cut along the dotted lines?"

"My blueprints are none of your business," says Chuck, and he sounds affronted now, anger and embarrassment dulling the edge of the fear. Mike takes an uneasy step forward, pushing between them, and the Duke glances at him and backs off, hiding his eyes behind the mirrored lenses of his glasses again. "And this _experiment_ was messed up enough when Kane did it, I'm not selling it to _you_."

"Okay then," says the Duke, apparently unfazed. "Sell me an arm instead. We'll figure it out."

Mike's hand goes straight to his staff. Chuck turns grayish-white and makes a strangled noise that might have been intended as an " _oh god_ what?".

"Figured you'd rather sell an arm than one of those _smokin'_ gams." The Duke shrugs. "What can I say, I'm a leg man. And you already messed up that arm, might as well just cut along the stitches and—"

"He's not _selling_ you any _body parts,_ " Mike says, disbelieving, and the Duke frowns and taps one of his ridiculously shiny shoes. "He told you, _no_."

"Command; override—"

But Mike is already talking over him. "Capture session," he says, and Chuck nods and mumbles _priority override acknowledged_ without taking his eyes off the Duke. "Assign user label "The Duke of Detroit".

"What do you—" The Duke starts to say, sounding almost offended at the interruption—neither of them is listening to him.

"Command: revoke access privilege, 'The Duke of Detroit'."

"Acknowledged," says Chuck, so quickly it almost overlaps. "Confirm."

"Confirmed."

The Duke frowns and crosses his arms. "…okay, show-off," he says. "Fine. I'm not a man to…play with other peoples' toys."

And then he goes "Hwugh—!" because Chuck just punched him in the face.

Number Two's gum pops. Mike's mouth drops open. It's not a spectacular punch—despite all of Mike's best efforts, Chuck's form is still awful—but it's got enough force behind it to snap the Duke's head back, send his glasses skittering away down the steps and knock him back into his throne.

"Whoa," says Mike, and then starts forward as Chuck advances on the Duke. "Hey! Chuck, dude, you might wanna calm—"

"No!" Chuck throws his hands up in the air in frustration, voice rising—Mike leans back again, eyebrows raised. "No, not after he got you hurt, not after he let Kane walk right into Motorcity and then turned around and ran back for our help as soon as Kane ditched him, not after he got my _freaking arm ripped off_ , no! I'm not gonna calm down! We could've hung you out to dry, you _asshole!_ But Mike was like _oh, he helped us out there at the end, maybe he's okay underneath it all_ because Mike's actually a good person and he tried to give you a chance to prove you're not a complete sack of shit!"

"Uh, Chuckles?"

"—aren't here for you to spy on and fuck with and act like we're some kind of TV show or something—!"

"Chuck, buddy—"

"Well if you want a closer look at my upgrades you can _have one_ —"

Mike lunges forward, catches Chuck's fist as he starts to raise it and pulls him back. Chuck yanks on his grip with surprising strength, chest heaving with terrified fury as the Duke scrambles up again, snatching up his cane and holding it ready. The tip of it is crackling with electricity.

"Chuck," says Mike again, and squeezes his wrist. Chuck jerks a little, breath hitching, and glances back at him. Some of the shaking anger eases out of him, just a little. "…I think he gets it," says Mike, and steps back a little. Chuck resists for a second, then steps back, glaring at the Duke as he goes. "You made your point, bro."

"You little—" The Duke reaches up to his face—his nose is bleeding, staining his bared teeth red. He looks at his bloody fingers and then glares up and growls "—how— _DARE you—_?!"

Chuck flinches back and then raises his hand, fingers spread wide; the port surfaces in the palm of his hand, flickering neon blue-green. His hands are shaking, but he still looks furious. "You started it, you psycho!"

"Whoa, hey!" Mike steps sharply between them—Chuck jerks his hand back as Mike blocks his view. "Hey, everybody _step back._ Chuck, you got your punch in. Duke, you were asking for that."

Number Two snorts. The Duke glances back at her furiously—her face is already blank again.

"Don't try to pretend you weren't," Mike says, before he can open his mouth. "You know what you did, you deserve worse than what you got. I should hit you too, I really— _really_ should."

The Duke grits his teeth, and then crosses his arms and—with a visible effort—smiles. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out another pair of sunglasses, settling them on the bridge of his bleeding nose.

"Fine," he says, cold. "You get your one free hit, blondie. _And,_ since I'm so generous, I'll even back off."

"You said that last time," Chuck says. In the wake of the adrenaline his voice shakes. "You better mean it this time, Duke, you—fucking—don't come anywhere near me. Don't touch me, don't talk to me, don't— _don't._ "

"Touchy," sneers the Duke, and then winces as Mike jerks forward, raising a fist warningly. "Okay, _fine._ Fine! I…" he grits his teeth like the words are painful. "…owe you one."

"Darn straight you do," says Mike, and steps back. "Come on, Chuck. Let's go home."

* * *

There's a card game going when they get back to the hideout—by the range of expressions, Julie is winning and Texas isn't taking it well, which might be why when he sees Mike and Chuck walk in he stands up and "accidentally" almost knocks the table over.

"Oh oops, messed up the game, well let's just say Texas makes a comeback win like he always does. Hey ladies, how'd your nerd fights go?!"

"It was a pizza party," says Chuck, who stopped bothering to wince at the word "nerd" a long time ago. "It was pretty n—"

"Chuck punched the Duke!"

Texas's mouth drops open. Everybody else turns to Chuck, staring, apparently waiting for him to deny it—he laughs a little nervously and shrugs.

"What was the _Duke_ doing at your weird nerd thing?" Texas says, breaking the strangled silence.

"He wasn't—we went to go see him after—"

" _Why_?" Julie looks impressed, confused and slightly horrified all at the same time.

"He didn't shoot you?" Dutch is looking both of them over like he's expecting one of them to fall over bleeding from a secret gunshot wound any second. "He just let you walk outta there?"

"Did you break his glasses though. Texas woulda broken his glasses."

"Guys! Relax." Mike strides across the room, towing Chuck by one arm, and settles down in the booth between Dutch and Julie. "It's a great story, and _Chuck_ …" he pats Chuck on the back and sits back. "…is gonna tell it for you."

"I…am?"

"Your story, dude," says Mike, and scoots over to let ROTH settle next to him and burrow under his arm. "I just drove you around."

"Oh!" Chuck sounds surprised and more than a little bit embarrassed, but when everybody turns to look at him expectantly he sits up a little straighter, pink around the ears. "—o-okay."

"Start at the beginning," says Texas. "Texas needs backstory."

"The beginning?"

" _ROTH_ ," Dutch hisses, and ROTH perks up under Mike's arm and chirps questioningly. " _Can you get us some popcorn_?"

"Yeah, y'know, where stuff is supposed to start. I don't mean that lame _couple weeks ago_ crap. TEXASIFY it! Dig deep!"

"…I started in the Kane Co. advanced robotics and programming courses when I was eight…?"

"Sure, sounds good."

" _And some salt._ "

" _Dutch, you're missing it._ "

Mike has the weirdest, most awesome team in the whole world. A couple of rough days are just a bump in the road, and it'll take more than that to pull this family apart. Mike leans back, throws an arm around his best friend's shoulder, and settles in to listen.


End file.
